It was cold. My furnace was sleeping in the basement, waiting for me to feed the correct instructions into my programmable thermostat. My son was on the Internet with the thermostat makers, seeking those magic words.

Me, I was not hopeful, for I had clashed with thermostats before. At a house we had just sold, we had installed heated tile floors in one large room. This heat was controlled by two thermostats, and the result was that one part of the room was cold as a vampire’s kiss while the other part was hot enough to fry eggs.

I suddenly thought of my mother. A child of wealth and privilege (although not much was left), she had her own way of dealing with thermostats and furnaces. Her tools consisted of a poker, tongs and a shovel. She went into the basement, hauled ashes from our coal furnace and tossed in more coal. Her thermostat could be defined as being told to wield that coal shovel when ice started to form in the kitchen sink.

She would never have needed a GPS or a brain monitor to tell her what she was thinking or one of those emergency swim armbands that send out signals when you are drowning. Her life – lived, say, 60 or 70 years ago – moved at a measured pace. And what she lacked in modern technology (that is, everything), she made up for in ease of existence.

When she picked up her dial phone and called a company or bank or institution, she was answered by a human voice who would cater to my mother’s wishes. She never heard the recorded voice that today tells the universal lie: “Your call is important to us.”

When she needed food or household supplies, she called her corner grocery store and whatever she asked for was delivered within the hour. And, no, she never dialled for pizza. Basics such as bread and milk came to her back door and, until perhaps 60 years ago, they came by way of horse and wagon. And, yes, the horse knew the way.

Pedlars with large suitcases also came to the same door – with some hesitation, for my mother had a large German shepherd that was keenly involved in all door openings. My mother always bought a package of needles or some thread.

The laundryman came weekly, and he could use the front door – for reasons I never knew. And the drugstore guy also came to the front door about three times a week, delivering packages of cigarettes.

If my mother wanted to go out, she would put on her white gloves in season and sometimes a hat with brief veil and take the bus downtown. That is to say, Queen and Yonge, where she had her choice of two department stores. Stores that stocked everything and delivered at least twice a day.

There was nothing high-tech, automated, battery-powered or accessed on a screen in my mother’s smooth life. And if you had predicted that someday people would take pictures with a phone, she would have collapsed in helpless laughter. After all, the damn thing was stuck on the wall.

The closest my mother came to modern living was her TV set. Watching a picture in black and white, she cheered for the even then hapless Maple Leafs. As for automation, the only form my mother had was a giant radio/record player on which you could stack 78s (as in “revolutions per minute”) on a spindle and marvel as they dropped onto the turntable.

My mother lived in a different era and, it seems to me, she might even have been happier for it. And that is why, when the heating guy came to breathe new life into my furnace, I told him to ditch the fancy thermostat and give me a simple one.

“What kind?” He asked.

“Off and on,” I replied – and that’s all she wrote.

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