News flash: There never were any good old days. They’re the sentimental invention of older folks who perhaps find themselves challenged or overwhelmed by the never-ending and rapid changes in technology, daily life, or societal norms. We often hear them cry for a return to the days of simple truth, vehicles whose malfunctions we could understand, respect for the pledge of allegiance, and only two genders.

Here’s what it was like in those hallowed days of yore. I pulled into my yard at dusk in the wintertime and judged by the sky whether it was going to be an especially cold night. If it looked as though it was going to be below zero. I had to make the decision whether to take the battery inside for the night. The electric starter hadn’t been invented too many years earlier (cars of the 1940s still usually had a dip or a hole in the center of the front bumper where the hand crank went through), but that innovation was powered by a 6-volt battery, which today seems puny. It often died in sub-zero weather, and the resulting click or low groan when we stepped on the starter in the morning before work was a sound that we avoided at all costs. Those costs often included the aforementioned transportation of the battery, sliding a lit Coleman stove under the oil pan while praying there was no gasoline leak, or waving down a passing friend for help pushing your dead vehicle. Good old days, my foot!

Or perhaps on a better day I pulled into Carl’s garage and asked, “Carl, what’s that ticking noise when I’m idling?” Likely as not, it was worn valve pushrod guides. He’d order them from the traveling parts guy, and the following weekend I could pull the car into his back bay, jack up the front, remove the right front wheel and pushrod covers, and replace them myself. I don’t recall thinking, as I crouched down there under the front fender fiddling with tiny oily semicylinders of polished steel, “Ah, someday I’ll look back on this as the good old days.”

And yet, when a warning light ignites now on my dashboard, I know that if I’m able to locate the latch and raise the hood, there’s likely nothing I can do to set things right. The beautifully integrated engine parts give little hint to the layperson as to their functions. Even a mechanic (nowadays more often called a technician) will attach a computer to the system to try to diagnose the malfunction. At time like those I do wish, ever so faintly, for the obviousness of carburetor, distributor, plug leads, and fuel lines. It wasn’t an elegant sight, but at least it was scrutable.

When you think about it, it seems that the better organized and the more technical we get, the easier we can be derailed. If the electricity died in my grandmother’s house, she had oil lamps to see by. The stove was natural gas, and the refrigerator was no problem because it was still an icebox, kept filled by a husky man in a horse-drawn wagon (later a tarp-covered truck) who came whistling up the back stairs.

Wistful as it makes me to consider it, I spend hours each day on my computer: reading, writing, corresponding, listening. The one I have at the moment is fairly new to me, and I’m still wrestling with its obsession with security and different ways of doing things that I’d just gotten accustomed to in the old one. But I’m still of the age that assumes that if there’s a problem with it, it’s my fault. When I turned it on the other day, it took over ten minutes to produce anything I could use. Half an hour later the screen turned black. And stayed that way. Uh-oh. All I could think of was a cowboy I saw one day years ago whose horse had just died. There’s not much you can accomplish while staring at a black screen right in front of you.

So I did something old-fashioned: picked up a book and started reading. After half an hour or so, the screen lit up again. I was on it with a tiger-bound. It’s working at the moment, and I won’t turn it off again till it’s on the way to the shop. I don’t have any idea what’s wrong with it. But I do know that I don’t miss my old Smith-Corona.