When I was growing up my Mom was a compulsive housekeeper. She didn’t work and my friends used to say, “You have the cleanest house in town.” My theory was that my Dad drank, often got drunk and sometimes embarrassed the family with what he said. Mom felt that if the house was clean at least we would “appear” to be a normal family. It seemed to work because most of the embarrassing things my Dad said were not in public but just in our own home. In 1984 Dad died but Mom still kept things compulsively clean. A few weeks ago I visited Mom in her new home in Santa Maria, CA and it turns out that she has 3 vacuum cleaners. I asked her why she needed 3 and she said something about different rooms needing different vacuums and having a couple of backups if one breaks down. Maybe my family wasn’t as “normal” as I once thought.