I hadn't thought about my machines for awhile, probably because they were all working as they should, watching over the telephone, the telephone answering machine, a clock or two, a bedside radio, a battery charger...the list, I found, got to be quite long.

Most of us, rich and poor, old and young, live with a lot of machines these days. They turn our furnaces off and on, regulate our refrigerators, dish- and clothes-washers, turn the front lawn sprinklers off and on, tell us how our car is running (or not running, as the case may be) and have a lot to do with how we live.

Of course, like all machines, they don't always work, and often they don't seem to work the way they are supposed to. So almost every one of them comes with a manual or a set of instructions and a telephone number--or these days a website (which presumes we also have a computer in the house)--so we can get support when reading the manual fails.

I've got a whole drawer filled with manuals for my machines. It covers everything from the lawn mower (and since I am a good environmentalist, it's an electric mower) to an electric screwdriver (which, I am sorry to say, no longer works). There are bulky sets of instructions for such things as the vacuum cleaner with its four filters to be cleaned to a simple single page for a little portable radio. The radio instructions tell you how to turn it on and off and that's about it.

The vacuum cleaner has diagrams dealing with belts, removal of the dust collector, how to coil the electric cord and so on.

Lying there, looking at my red lights, I got to wondering how it was when we didn't have all these devices to help us through life.

It made me think of a long time ago when I was a boy growing up in my grandfather's house.

In those days machines were not much of a problem. There just weren't many of them around.

I could probably count them on the fingers of both hands.

My grandfather's house didn't have central heating and certainly didn't have a thermostat that turned the heat on each morning and off each evening. We used wood stoves strategically located to do the most good, but they really didn't keep the house very warm.

We did have a rudimentary electric vacuum cleaner, but there was no heater giving us a ready supply of hot water. We heated our Saturday night bath water with a hot gas gadget that managed a bathtub full at a time.

It was a good many years before we got an icebox and the regular delivery of ice. We never had a refrigerator. Late in my grandfather's life he was given a radio, an Atwater Kent.

My grandmother, who was opposed to progress in any form, hated it. She said it made everything too fast, a view she held of the world in general.

We used to sit on the floor beneath it to hear Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy on Sunday evenings after I had brought in a load of oak logs for the wood box.

We did have electricity, although my other grandfather didn't. He used Coleman lanterns. He didn't have a flush toilet either.

That all seems a long time ago, and it was.

Some folks today would say times were tougher then. I don't know that they seem in retrospect to be any better, and I must confess I much prefer my sleek little Saturn to the Model T Ford in which I learned to drive. It, too, belonged to my grandfather, but no one in his family would let him drive it. He was considered a menace. He'd grown up with horses and buggies and seemed to think driving a car was something like guiding a horse.

Well, I suppose the moral of the machines is that times change. Little machines of all kinds have become so much a part of our lives we don't think of them. They are just there, even as they weren't there a couple of generations ago.

And yet I would not want to take my many machines for granted. They require tending. They need repair. They're just not human. They stare at me now in the dark as if waiting for me to tell them what to do.

I'm sure about what to tell them. I'm not even sure if I think I like them.

So, as usual, we settle down for the night in a kind of wary truce.

Keep up the good work, I say, silently.

And like the obedient servants they are, they don't say anything.