The Richie Factor

What would Richie think of this?

“I can fix this” and what that’s meant in my life.

Moments in time when life plays a chord

Richie was a tech/gear nerd: camcorder, rechargeable batteries, cordless phone, garage ring system, island phones, snowmobile, handheld gps, custom van w/ undocumented features, radar detector, vhs player… When I was a kid, these seemed comically old to me. Like prototype versions of the items most other people had… But there was a reason for that, Richie was an early adopter. He probably would have bought a Rio too, or an HD-DVD player, or Memorex 40x CD-ROM drive. Or set up a DVD drive in a PC with S video out to watch The Matrix. He’s why I put custom lighting in my cars, and was never hesitant to dive in and install speakers everywhere and anywhere. He’s why I made a shockwire extension cord and ran hundreds of feet of his through the trees. He encouraged this in me because he saw this kinship with me. We bonded over being tinkerers. Builders. Fixers. /Improvers/… We shared a faith in ourselves that we could take what we had around us and make it better. Not always or even often by investing in a new, better thing at a premium price point, but by learning how to use our smarts and our strength to do the work ourselves. Richie would have rooted phones. He’d have multiple microcontroller projects, and he would have DEFINITELY modded his consoles! Richie and I shared the same passions in life, and he gave me full access to his wares to make whatever project I could imagine. Unless he felt I was either being wasteful with materials or too destructive, I was left to self-direct and pursue my own projects, usually at my regular station in the basement in front of the dryer (Inee made sure there were extra rugs down so I wouldn’t get cold from the cement floor ) just around the stairway and chest freezer from his basement “project table”, across from the wood stove, with the workbench just past that. The boys and I have this, with me in the Richie role… It bridges them to him through me, and thats magic to me.