When I was a little kid my mom lived in this rooftop apartment on Marengo Street in Pasadena. But rooftop apartment isn’t quite the right description – it wasn’t an open-air bar atop a fancy hotel. It was this building: My dad had custody of me during the week, letting my mom have me for the weekends. This apartment was the first and best location for my mom weekends. I was still crazy about her and she wasn’t out of control yet. She was an alcoholic but she managed to keep the same part time job for years. In her later years she became a hoarder; but at the apartment on Marengo she was just a scatter-brained collector with a perfect eye trained towards trash and cheap stuff that was beautiful. In this apartment, the vintage children’s books weren’t on the floor and soaked in cat pee like they were in her last apartment, and the old toys weren’t mixed in with clothes she never wore in the bedroom she couldn’t ope...