I celebrate the 972 miles that separate me from my father's house. And every hotel and vacation rental unit I pass each time I drive to visit him. Instead of returning the phone call of my grieving father who-- three years after my mother's death-- still refuses to sit in her spot on the couch, I want to float like a weightless balloon across the state of Ohio, high above the bland nothingness of the Midwest, to any of the elite hot spring resorts in northern California. Instead of thinking of the numerous hours my father walks around the neighborhood avoiding all the rooms that once contained his family, I want to celebrate the finely aged bottle of Zinfandel that would be placed before me atop a table of richly embroidered cloth. And each afternoon I would most likely visit all three of the resort's exclusive espresso bars to indulge in several extra-large, high-fat hazelnut macchiatos. And each evening I'd disappear into the private library-- adorned with numerous upholstered chairs-- to read from a safe, manageable distance the harsh realism of any of Theodore Dreiser's major works. And even if my father discovered where I was and mysteriously arrived in his black swimming trunks and lowered his seventy-seven-year-old shoulders into the curative hot spring water beside me, Franz--the resort manager--would know to turn the radio dial from the station repeatedly playing Bob Dylan's album Blood on the Tracks to the Red Sox game. Instead of again discussing the lack of nutrition in my father's nightly dinner of peanut butter and crackers we would listen in silence to David Ortiz launch a homerun into the right field bleachers. And even if my father announced his intention to spend another few days at this private resort and that through sheer good fortune he had reserved the room next to mine there would still be the double-bolted door which my father could not unlock and thick walls to help drown out his blaring television and there will be state-of-the-art pillows which would invite me into the deepest sleep so far from my father pacing in the next room that no matter how loud he might call my name I could not possibly be expected to hear.