I am not an engineer. But I have loved them, lived with them, tripped over their stray circuit boards and soldering guns. I am the English major daughter of an EE who earned his master's at Columbia. My bedtime stories were about Goldilocks and the Three Engineers (too many amps, not enough amps, etc.). My brother Rick earned a PhD in EE from MIT. My brother Jim is an IE with a MBA. A family of initials.

When my brothers and I were kids, my father would take us on weekly trips to the dump to collect old televisions, computers and all things electronic to be disassembled and reconfigured in the basement. I loved to watch my brothers and my father make designs in a circuit board. I would steal the colorful scraps of wire and braid them into rings and bracelets.

My father Orville Richard and my brother Richard Orville built a television from a kit when I was a toddler. It was huge and had a fake oak cabinet that gave it extra heft. That television lasted 27 years and two moves until it smoldered its last in my father's living room one spring afternoon. My stepmother, Linda, tells me she brought out a fire extinguisher, but my father refused to commit the sacrilege of leaving spare parts unsalvaged. He patted out the fire with a towel, but no part of that television ever worked again.

When I was 10, my father took me to work with him for the day at the IBM Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. He showed me the room-sized computers and let me play my first computer game on his mainframe. It had no graphics, just a gray screen. I played a fantasy game called Zork. The machine prevailed.

My father and Rick are both gone, but their legacy lives on. My father helped design the IBM 360 mainframe. Rick collaborated on articles like "Two-dimensional round-robin schedules for packet switches with multiple input queues." Sometimes, when I fight with my laptop or the speaker wires, I know they are there, helping me figure it out, as if their knowledge were coded in my genes.

My brother Jim currently applies his IE degree at an engineering company. The circuits don't fall far from the board. Recently, I went to hear Jim's son, my nephew Jordan, perform with his rock band. One of the microphone wires was not grounded properly, and suddenly, I sensed the acrid smell of electrical wires shorting and about to ignite.

It was, to me, like the comforting scent of hot cocoa on a cold winter's day.

Susan J. LaMaire, a freelance writer based in Parsippany, N.J.