One Hundred Things My Mother Taught Me A Million Times – Chapter 78

#78 – “Never throw anything away. You never know when you might need it.”

Despite the above mom-maxim, she wasn’t a hoarder. I am sure of this because we could walk through our house without standing on garbage and we slept in beds.  Until I watched a few episodes of the TV series Hoarders I thought that a hoarder was someone (mom) who kept 3 rubber bands on their wrist, a small pile of twisty ties in a drawer, 10 empty (clean) milk jugs on the back porch, and a 2-foot pile of Dallas Morning News and New York Times on the bedroom floor.  Apparently mom was an amateur hoarder.

As it turns out, my first real experience with hoarding was when a friend told me about a house they were buying that was so full of stuff that when they went to look at the house they could barely walk through it. She said that there were only small trails throughout the house. I couldn’t quite picture what she was describing and thought that she must surely be exaggerating. Then I, along with millions of other mesmerized Americans, watched Hoarders. It is not just the stunning visual of homes stacked to the ceiling with stuff, and people living in unbelievably unlivable conditions that make it all so intriguing, but also the impact on the people and families involved:  isolation, shame, anger, fear, sorrow, families torn apart by a seemingly uncontrollable need to keep things. Click on Read More Below...

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry

I’m not entirely sure why I chose to re-read Helter Skelter (published in 1995) other than the fact that the sensational 1969 “Tate-LaBianca” murders left such an indelible mark on my memory. Having read my share of true crime, I have a peculiar curiosity about how and why people seem to get away with murder. For every person convicted, there are many more never caught.  And, if you believe those convicted, they didn’t do it either, which means that lots of people are getting away with murder. I find this extremely annoying since I can’t even get away with driving five miles over the speed limit.

At seven hundred pages, Helter Skelter is not a beach read, and the story is so disturbing as to have retained its fascination for forty-two years.  Here’s the 50-cent tour of this true-life murder mystery:  Sharon Tate is a beautiful but talentless actress in her 20’s who is eight months pregnant by famous movie director Roman Polanski. One night, while Polanski is in Europe, Tate and a number of friends congregate at the Tate/Polanski Los Angeles home, including coffee heiress Abigail Folger, her boyfriend Wojciech Frykowski, and hair stylist to the stars Jay Sebring (Tate and Sebring are pictured above). The next morning, the Tate/Polanski housekeeper arrives to find the four of them, and a young guy who made an ill-timed stop at the house, all murdered in horribly macabre ways. That same night an older Los Angeles couple, the LaBiancas, are similarly slaughtered and I do mean slaughtered – Rosemary LaBianca was stabbed 41 times. Click on Read More Below...