If you visit my parents' house, and you open their refrigerator door, and you look in their pantry, you'll see that someone in the house grew up hungry.

My parents' refrigerator overflows with cheese, candy bars, yogurt cups, bacon, deli meat, jam and jelly and marmalade, cold soda, milk and cream and orange juice.  Their pantry has boxes and boxes of crackers, little packages of peggy lawton cookies, biscotti, pounds and pounds of pasta, natural peanut butter in smooth and chunky, and at least two kinds of rolls, and three kinds of bread. Jars of olives and pickles and a basket, almost laundry-basket size, of granola bars, in at least three varieties.

 There's ice cream in the freezer. Vanilla is a staple. Black rasberry makes an appearance. 

 Only three people live in my parents house, all adults. All of whom eat a very healthy diet, on most days. Oatmeal or eggs for breakfast, slim sandwiches and salad for lunch, chicken and vegetables for dinner...yet the small kitchen and pantry are prepared for inundation by starving toddler hoards, with hollow cheeks and empty bellies, open hands outstretched for ritz cracker after ritz cracker spread with blackberry jam.

My father was hungry as a child. He's never said this outright; he doesn't talk about the specific lacks in his childhood. I don't know how many siblings he has, or step-parents. He doesn't talk about how he came to live with his grandparents for several years of his early childhood, or why his only baby picture shows a bright-eyed baby with thin wisps of dark hair and a swollen, dislocated shoulder.

I know he was hungry, though. My father's most glowing childhood memories aren't of baseball games, or storytime, or beach vacations - they're of food. I don't know if my father had a childhood best friend. I don't know the name of any of his teachers. I know the name of the store where his grandfather bought peanut butter, coffee, and black bread.

I know that the black bread was actually pumpernickel, but that it was sold as "black bread" by the russian jews running the butter and egg store under an Irish name. I know that the loaves were the size of a bike wheel, and they would cut you a wedge to take home. 

I don't know whether my father was raised in the religion I was raised in; but I know that, once, for Christmas, when he was nine years old, he was given a half-dozen cinnamon donuts. Because his birthday is in December, this was also his birthday present.

Hunger does not enter my parents' house. My father filled his house to feed his three children so that they would never be hungry, but I don't know whether we could ever have eaten enough so that he'd be full.

My parents don't have enough mouths to eat all the food in their pantry, or their fridge. Bread goes moldy. Cheese gets hard and cracked and must be thrown away. There's not enough room to store or enough time to eat the produce and meat they buy. My sister and I leave even the shortest visit with grocery bags full of food. 

The waste kills my father; but it's the price of the abundance that he cannot abandon.

The waste and abundance of my parents house do not end in the kitchen.

My brother is a brilliant musician. He's amazing. I am entirely tone-deaf; to the extent that I don't actually understand what people talk about when they talk about music, so I can't actually even understand how good he is. He's that good, though. He's so good that he was a prodigy, then a rumor. He is virtuosic, a natural talent. 

He does not perform. He barely plays anymore. 

I visit my parents sometimes, and if I drop in without warning,  my father will be sitting in the living room, listening to the radio, or a C.D.. We'll chat for a few minutes, about school and work and culture and politics. Then he'll say:

"Stop for a minute. Just listen to this."

The music. Usually a guitar part. Maybe the famous gypsy with the missing finger. Maybe the white bluesman wih the harelip. Maybe a thousand other musicians that I can't identify, because I don't listen to music. 

"Your brother is better than this."

"Yeah, dad. I know."

My brother is usually in the basement when this happens. Probably, working in the workshop, off the soundproofed studio that my father built. My father will hear my brother turn on a saw, and his face will go grey. 

"He's going to ruin his hands."

"Maybe, dad. But he likes to build..."

 "It's a waste. He'll never be happy until he cuts all his fingers off."  My father's biggest fear is that my brother will damage his hands; the hands that my father would have killed for, trapping the talent that my brother, I think, may never have chosen for himself.

My father would have been a good musician. He was a drummer, a guitar player. He was in wedding bands and studio bands, before he began working in the shipyard, first as labor, then as a draftsman. Without a formal education, he clawed his way up from fitting pipes in ships to owning a firm that designed the pipes and chutes and safety features and valves that together, constitute clean rooms and pharmaceutical plants. 

He'd have rather been a musician.

I may spend time at my parents house for a while this summer, becoming a member of the rebound generation for a time, saving some money for other projects. 

I am a little bit talented. Not in my brother's way; there is no objective criteria for my sort of gooey intelligence. I have it easier than most, though, and I'll admit it, with certain fields of study. And I have it easier than a few, with certain types of pursuit. A handful of things come naturally to me. 

My mother put herself through college, as a commuter. She worked two or three jobs; her family, large, irish, catholic, had the money to send the boys to school - but she had to work her way through. My mother loves books, loves literature, loves literary criticism and poetry. She would have killed to be an english major; but, to support herself, and to make sure that she would have a job after graduation, she went into a more practical field.

I convinced her to go back to school the same year I started college for the first time. She won't get a degree, though. She only wants to do the work. That's my mother.The only thing that keeps her, herself, though, is sneaking out across the river, and studying Faulkner and Wilde and epic poetry, and writing papers that go over the heads of most of her professors (all but one).

When I dropped/was kicked the ever living fuck/ out of college the first time, I took some of the same night classes as my mother did. We were competitive. It was fun. Her papers were deeper than mine; she tackled the big topics. Themes and thoughts and philosophy, the nature of art. I wrote ridiculous little papers about how method actors should be prohibited, by iron-clad contract, from performing "The Importance of Being Earnest." She wrote about redemption; I wrote about Indiana Jones. 

She labored over her papers, and her reading. She edited and re-edited; I read the reading on the train to class. I wrote the papers the night before they were due. I tried carefully not to curse. 

My mother, like all brilliant, hard-working women, has this idea, this unshakeable idea, that there is something somehow less genuine ... about things that take effort. Because her papers took her days, and mine took hours, then, obviously - I had something she had not. (Not so. She had ambition, diligence, and something serious to contribute to the conversation. I was flip, ballsy, and playing games).

My mother's papers ALWAYS intimidated me with their depth and insight. It's a shock to all 19 and 20 year olds to realize that their parents are intelligent human beings, and have been for decades - to realize that my mother was masquerading as just-my-mom for years, when she's got the intellect and literary sensitivity to produce papers like those - fucking mindblowing.  Not that I said as much. I probably should.

Like my brother and my father, I am my mother's waste. 

My mother made sure that I could go to college and live there, that I could dedicate myself to study, that I could have the real immersion that she never had, while she was attending classes in between her first job and her second. I mentioned earlier that I got kicked out, yes. Yes. I did. 

That, for me, was the end of literature. (Except for those night classes.)

 And there I was, a few years later, doing the same thing she did. Commuting to school. Working eight hours, four hours of classes, a few minutes of reading, and doing it all the next day. I didn't make a friend, join a club, or take a single elective at the University I graduated from.  Then law school. She's proud. Very proud; don't let me convince you for a moment that there's anyone in my family - hell, my NEIGHBORHOOD - that isn't going to burst for me on May 22. 

 But because my mother suspects that I have something she doesn't; (I don't. Trust me. Her writing, if I could GODDAMN convince her to write - is lightyears beyond mine. ) ... and I KNOW that she gave me something she never had...I know that I am abundance and surplusage.

Like the knot rolls growing green in the pantry, I am something a bit too much, that takes too much space and never quite came to what it could have.