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Lisa Caren Ehrlich: Tinkerer and Gadgeteer

 

After she had opened, revamped and overhauled a home computer about a dozen times, Lisa Caren Ehrlich decided to name the thing. "She called it Frankenstein's Monster, because the case wouldn't close any more and the pieces didn't fit in," said Jonathan Ehrlich, her husband. Dauntless tinkerer, fanatical gadgeteer -- she got power tools on birthdays and a blowtorch to make crème brulée -- Mrs. Ehrlich had a soft spot for useless frog paraphernalia. "As long as the frog wasn't too cartoonlike," her husband said.

Mrs. Ehrlich, 36, and her family lived in Midwood, Brooklyn, near the high school she had attended, Edward R. Murrow. On summer evenings, they would stop at a coffee bar in Sheepshead Bay, because she was as serious about her java as she was about the Mets. Somehow she managed to raise two sons, Ryan and Myles, who were devoted to the team in the Bronx. She rounded them up to make sure they saw the end of a perfect game pitched by former Met David Cone for the Yankees.

Only one of her boys loved to read, so Mrs. Ehrlich took a speed-reading course, to encourage the one who wasn't interested. And in her job as relationship manager for Aon Corporation at the World Trade Center, she was constantly taking or teaching courses. One of her students brought his best friend to meet her about five years ago. "We completed each other's sentences on the first date," Mr. Ehrlich said.

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From "Profiles in Grief" of The New York Times