My mother, Renee Ellis, worked as a public-school librarian.
She was intelligent, warm, and impossibly stubborn.
She believed every problem could be made less frightening if someone helped you find the right book.
Our house was filled with them.
Books on history.
Engineering.
Novels.
Poetry.
Languages.
And old encyclopedias my mother rescued when the library replaced them with newer editions.
Dad taught me to understand how things worked.
Mom taught me to ask whose lives they affected.
Between them, I developed a fascination with technology that had a practical purpose.
I wasn't interested in building something impressive simply because it looked futuristic.
I wanted to make equipment safer, more reliable, and easier for ordinary people to afford.
When I was thirteen, Dad took me to his hospital's maintenance workshop during a supervised family open day.
He showed me the testing equipment.
Explained why medical devices required strict inspection.
And introduced me to several technicians who treated him with obvious respect.
One woman pointed toward a large cabinet.
โYour father saved us a terrible headache last month.โ
Dad waved one hand.
โJust routine maintenance.โ
She shook her head.
โCaleb, nothing about that problem was routine.โ
I watched him blush.
On the drive home, I asked what happened.
He explained that a portable medical system had developed a recurring thermal-management fault.
The equipment didn't fail catastrophically.
Its protective mechanisms detected the problem and stopped operation.
But repeated shutdowns made it unreliable for clinical use.
Dad worked with the manufacturer's authorized service team to identify the issue and arrange the appropriate repair.
I listened.
Then asked why equipment couldn't simply be designed to stay cooler.
He nodded toward the road.
โEngineers work on that every day.โ