RadioShack Was My Disney World

I have already told you about the screwdriver terror in my house. But that is barely half the story. Because while other children begged to go to the cinema or the park, I had my own list of paradises — and not one of them contained a ride.

I did not read what my cousins read. I awaited Popular Mechanics the way other people await a letter that matters. And alongside it, the photography magazines — not for the images, but for the lenses, the apertures, the manner in which a camera was constructed from the inside out. I loved audio equipment with something I can only describe, in retrospect, as romance. And of all the components in a stereo system, my favorites were the speakers. I cannot entirely explain why. Perhaps because there you could observe — could even feel with your hand — vibration transforming into sound. That transformation felt almost magical.

And speaking of taking things apart: I disassembled every camera that ever entered our house. All of them. I spared nothing. At some point my mother must have recognized the pattern — but she never truly stopped me. And that, I realize now, was an enormous gift, even if it probably cost her a camera or two along the way.

But one place deserves capital letters in this story: RadioShack. For me, RadioShack was Disney World. I am not saying that for narrative effect — I mean it literally. My mother ran her errands and left me there, the way you drop a child at an amusement park with the promise of return. I could dedicate a full hour to contemplating resistors, cables, electronics kits I could not afford, memorizing them as if an examination were approaching.

And Home Depot? For a geek child, that was not a hardware store. It was a candy store. Every aisle represented a different promise — the power tools, the plumbing, the cables. I traversed those aisles the way other children traverse a toy store, mentally acquiring everything I would take if I had the money and the permission.

But here is what was probably the real dream all along, the thing that no electronics kit and no speaker could ever surpass: meeting a geek girl. That was paradise. Because it was not about an object I could take apart and understand. It was about someone who understood — without my having to explain a single thing — why a carbon resistor or a perfectly calibrated speaker could provoke such happiness in me. Someone who did not look at me strangely when I talked about it. Someone who spoke the same language, no translation required.

And after all these years, I believe that is the most honest summary of what being a geek really is. It was never the collection of objects, the magazines, the stores converted into personal temples. It is the need for somebody else to understand why those things move us. Everything else — RadioShack, Home Depot, the speakers, the disassembled cameras — is merely the setting. The real paradise was always finding someone who spoke the same language.

I still wonder whether that part ever changed, even though the stores did.

And always — stay focused, stay curious. I'm The Senior Geek.

Dr. Jose A. Cisneros, MD, Ph.D · seniorgeek.net

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