“Just a quick run to Radio Shack!”

Remembering my biggest sister 5 years after a drunk driver took her from us.

There are so many ways to remember Karen, and here’s the one I’m choosing right now:

In the last few years of Karen’s life, she got into karaoke. Like WAY into karaoke! She not only started to run her own DJ business, but because our dad was such a big singer, she hooked him up with all the home gear, too! It only took him showing a LITTLE interest to set her off and running. BAM, she was going to get him everything.

Our dad was already hooked on media and tech, and one of the biggest battles he and I would have was about his compulsive need for me to take apart and rebuild his A/V setup just about every other week. There was always some new box that needed to be added.

WIRES. SO MANY WIRES.

And now with Karen’s karaoke gear, here were SO MANY MORE. Microphones, discs, ANOTHER piece of equipment to rig into the existing maelstrom of DVD and VHS players, CD racks, receivers, laserdiscs, and whatever other gear he got a “great deal” on from eBay.

Listen, I certainly inherited a love of tech, but…this was wild. And complicated! Visits from Karen would inevitably become presentations, with us trying to show dad how to actually enjoy the stuff. He COLLECTED it all, but it was SO complicated to set up, that he couldn’t keep it straight how to actually USE everything!

So Karen and I would make constant trips together to Best Buy and Radioshack for little adapters and upgrades and wires, in an effort to SOMEHOW simplify the setup. The entire time we’d be making each other laugh as we strategized the NEXT technique to get dad set up to enjoy his home theater.

Endless….ENDLESS!

I would have quit VERY QUICKLY, myself, but Karen was NOT A QUITTER. She was 100% hellbent on getting our dad EXACTLY the tech setup he always dreamed of.

And FINALLY, after probably MONTHS of us working this configuration, building and rebuilding……….

He still.

Didn’t.

Get it.

Dad’s ambition to have it all and have it hooked up simultaneously just meant there were always 5+ remotes that each had a specific job, a million inputs to memorize, and on and on and on…

But I think dad’s goal wasn’t about the gear.

Now I realize he cared less about karaoke or his tech and more about seeing his oldest and youngest kids working together. I don’t think any of our lessons and techy Ted Talks clicked with him because he wasn’t interested in what we were saying, but rather that we were all together, laughing and building and working side by side by side.

Both of them are gone now.

Back then it drove me a little insane to constantly revisit the same problem with no results. Now I love it.*

I miss them both so much. Obsessively navigating rooms of wires like Indiana Jones gently stepping around a thousand snakes was a dorky little adventure. And to have a ring leader like Karen who was hellbent on getting it right was both fun and funny and and always had me in awe at her dedication to GO GO GO. To spend that time with her, working to fix something, was time that we spent just the two of us. It didn’t happen much.

Frequently I remember Karen as a force. As if she was literally the embodiment of kinetic energy.

She was so much fun. She kept things on the rails.

Five years without Karen has me stunned.

I can’t wait to tell my daughter Zoe about her amazing aunt who she’ll never meet, but whose determination and positivity hopefully live on…and, of course, make Zoe rearrange MY entertainment center for MY entertainment.

(I love you Karen. And I miss you.)