Not only do I think this is one of the best of the twelve stories included in “California Vignettes,” but largely because its concept arose out of separate note-worthy events, its origin is one of the more interesting.
First of all, the idea of a hoarder stuffing his home from one end to the other with all manner of things he can’t bear to throw away is one I had long been familiar with. Not only were the famous New York hoarders, Homer and Langley Collyer, quite frequently in the news, but one of my favorite authors, E.L. Doctorow, wrote an eponymously titled book about them.
And, there really was a hoarder and former chemistry teacher in Santa Rosa who filled his backyard with old chemicals and lab experiments that one hot day exploded. This event caused the man tons of grief with the authorities, and his ex-wife immediately filed against him in court, asking that the home immediately be sold so that she could receive her share of its equity which she had not insisted on receiving at the time they divorced.
As to the fourteen-year-old protagonist, I invented him out of whole cloth as a vehicle to get to the hoarder. He, in essence, sympathetic though I tried to make him, was there only to carry the story so as to give a look at a lonely old man who just happened to be a hoarder.
You can find “California Vignettes” and its twelve stories on Amazon
