Before my father became a man dying quietly in a hospital bed in the living room, he was the sound of chewing gum in the basement.
The basement felt like its own world beneath the house. The concrete floor had been painted green years before I was born and chipped away slowly over time until patches of gray showed through like scars. One wall was covered by an old workbench nearly ten feet long, cluttered with television parts, screwdrivers, soldering irons, loose wires, coffee cans full of screws, and half-disassembled TVs hauled home from houses across the river.
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead constantly.
The pool table sat behind me under piles of old clothes meant for a garage sale that never happened. At one point it had been covered with a giant sheet of plywood holding a model train set we got for Christmas. The little town painted onto the board had felt magical when I was young. Tiny buildings. Fake roads. Plastic trees dusted with artificial snow. Later the train disappeared, the plywood disappeared, and eventually the pool table became storage like everything else adults planned to deal with someday.
But the workbench remained alive.
Dad spent long nights down there repairing televisions from rich houses in St. Joe while chewing gum and half-watching whatever game happened to be on another set nearby. Back then I thought he was a genius. Looking back now, I understand most of it was module replacement and knowing what commonly failed in certain models. But to me as a kid, it looked like magic.
Broken things arrived.
Then they worked again.
I wanted desperately to help.
Dad usually gave me small jobs that probably kept me occupied more than anything else. Hand me that screwdriver. Untangle this cord. Sort these screws. But sometimes he trusted me with the tube tester, and that felt important.
The tester came from his work. I treated it like sacred equipment.
I would sit there carefully following the instructions while testing vacuum tubes one by one, sorting them into categories only a child would think sounded scientific.
Works perfect.
Completely dead.
Meah.
I took the job seriously. Probably more seriously than the job deserved.
Looking back, I was probably annoying as hell. I hovered constantly. Asked questions nonstop. Lost focus halfway through tasks and wandered into something else before finishing the first thing. My brain moved faster than school ever seemed willing to tolerate.
Back then nobody talked about ADHD.
Teachers didn’t suggest medication. They suggested prayer.
God was real because adults said He was real. That was enough for children. Catholic school wrapped itself around the calendar of our lives so completely that time itself felt religious. Ash Wednesday. Lent. Easter. Christmas. The sermons marked the seasons as much as the weather did.
And winters in Southwest Michigan felt endless when you were a child.
I remember lying awake late at night hoping snow would keep falling hard enough for school to close by morning. Public schools would shut down eventually, but Catholic school held out until the very last possible hope of children arriving on time. We would wake before sunrise listening to the radio for closures while snow buried the streets outside.
Childhood winters felt magical back then.
Honestly, most of childhood did.
Growing up in a large family meant there was always somebody around to play with, whether they wanted to or not. We climbed trees, played baseball in empty lots, rode bikes until the streetlights came on, and turned ordinary things into entire worlds through imagination alone. When I climbed high enough into the trees, I imagined I was piloting spaceships instead of hanging over dirt and roots.
Christmas felt bigger in a house full of children.
My mother loved Christmas more than anyone I’ve ever known. The house transformed during the holidays. Decorations came out like sacred artifacts. Music played constantly. Wrapping paper covered entire sections of the living room floor. And the best part of being one of many children was that you didn’t just experience your own excitement. You experienced everyone else’s too.
I didn’t just get my presents.
I got to watch my brothers and sisters get theirs.
Even if they refused to share at first, eventually they always shared the experience itself.
For a long time I honestly believed my childhood was perfect.
Maybe children are supposed to feel that way before they become old enough to notice the cracks in adults.
School, though, never felt magical to me.
Elizabeth always seemed naturally good at it in ways I wasn’t. She could focus, organize, study, and succeed in ways that impressed adults. Teachers loved her for it. Dad was proud of her.
Diane was older and already beginning to build her own life by then. I mostly remember watching everyone else seem to understand how school worked while I sat there feeling defective.
Homework especially felt impossible.
I would stare at assignments while my brain scattered in ten directions at once. The boredom physically hurt. I couldn’t force myself to care about things that failed to grab my attention. Teachers saw distraction. Laziness maybe. Lack of discipline.
But downstairs was different.
Fixing things made me feel smart.
The basement rewarded curiosity in ways school never did. Nobody cared if I sat still. Nobody cared if I bounced between ideas. If something sparked my attention, I chased it until I understood it or accidentally destroyed it trying.
At some point I discovered I could use the transformer from the old train set to experiment with electricity. I remember splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen and thinking I had basically become a scientist. When I lit the hydrogen and heard the tiny pop it made, I thought I was the smartest kid alive.
I was hot shit.
The basement became my laboratory long before I understood what laboratories actually were.
Years later I would realize those nights shaped almost everything that came after. Computers. Networking. Scripting. Troubleshooting. The obsession with understanding how systems worked. The satisfaction of repairing broken things. The feeling that intelligence lived in hands as much as classrooms.
My first computer came later. My mother bought it for me after I begged for what felt like forever. I think it cost around twenty dollars on clearance, which was not a small amount of money for my family back then. Looking back now, the machine was barely capable of anything. It had only 2K of memory, less than what exists in most modern toys.
At the time, though, it felt limitless.
That little machine changed my life before I even understood why.
But back then it was simpler.
Downstairs, I wasn’t the distracted kid teachers worried about.
I was helping Dad fix televisions.