The husband was freakishly tall and thin, six eight, 160 at the most, while the wife was short and stout, almost like a footstool with hair. They had two children, a boy who, sadly, looked like Mom, and a girl, who, sadly, looked like Dad. While my family ate TV dinners and watched M*A*S*H, I would often picture the circus family at dinnertime, the father and daughter consuming a single bean while plucking birds from the sky, the mother and son eating whole cows and hundreds of pies before going out back to roll around with their pigs. Despite their differences and oddities, however, I always knew they were a family even though others seemed confounded. I guess I could just sense it, that familiarity that families have, the same way I could smell rain coming. Ironically, though, I had trouble discerning that odor in my own family. While strangers certainly never had any difficulty telling that I was my father’s son—we’re both little fireplugs of men, with sandy hair, occasionally clenched fists, and stomping walks—I always felt as if I were the illegitimate son of a circus performer.
