It is too bad that he doesn’t see that I am who I am because of who he was. I mean most of the stuff that I am interested in and even things that have led me to the jobs that I’ve had are because of him and it’s crazy that he never saw that.

When we were younger my parents got him a brand new computer, a DOS based computer, not one of these fancy computers we have these days. We learned how to create and play games on these older computers that I’m talking about. You would have to buy a book and actually code in the game, save it to a cassette tape or a floppy disk if you are lucky enough to have one, and then you can play it after it’s done loading after dinner.

We sat there for hours and hours for days and weeks months and years learning how to use that computer, long before everybody else was learning.

For fun he and I used to take VCRs apart just to see how they worked; fortunately since our family owned a video store we were able to clean not only our company VCRs but we were able to charge customers to clean theirs long before there was a service or a tape you can stick in to do it for you.

I wouldn’t know anything that I know about speakers and sound systems and cars and everything that I’m interested in if it wasn’t for him. It is horrifically interesting how unimportant the ones that leave us behind think they are, they just can’t see how special they are. There isn’t one thing in my life that I do that doesn’t have anything to do with him in one way or another.
Perhaps those of us that are still here should recognize that we have that same power.