A while back our clothes dryer died after who knows how many years, or decades, of faithful service. We thus found ourselves in a time warp back to those days of youth, before kids and jobs and possessions and insurance.

Back then we lived more in the moment, dealing with whatever came up right then and there. We had a rusty old car, lived in a rented apartment and had no idea if we had health insurance. If your washing machine or any other appliance stopped working, a call to Mr. Tibbets would be all you would need. Within hours he’d show up with a cornucopia of belts and gadgets to fix it.

There is no Mr. Tibbets today to look at your broken-down washing machine. But a crew from a local franchise that advertises such arrived, took the machine apart and discovered they had to wait until a part arrived from China.

You don’t have to know the rest, suffice to say life without a washing machine added a further level of anxiety as we sought to wash our clothes at the local laundromat. A laundromat is a place you go to when you have all the clothes you own in the world piled up and no way to wash them all. A laundromat is an entire space given over to large machines in neat rows, a formation of square-shouldered soldiers to wash and dry your laundry, no questions asked.

There is a caretaker, someone to whom you may ask for change or guidance. The laundromat I went to takes only quarters. A load of wash costs 12 or 14 quarters, so you need a dump truck full of change and a calculator to do a load of wash.

Everything I know about laundry I learned from old movies and past issues of National Geographic. I know women took their laundry to the river, where they were pounded mercilessly against the rocks (the clothes, not the women).

I grew up in an apartment where tenants shared a washing machine in the basement. It was old and old-fashioned, with a set of ringers and a crank, and once or twice through the ringers, the clothing was ready for the clothesline.

Washing clothes and cooking dinner were exclusively women’s work. Following WWII, housewives (a term for women who stayed home while their husbands went to work) became a target for advertisers, who had the prosperity to sell, in the form of new modern appliances.

Big items like refrigerators, washing machines, home freezers, became things the new housewife couldn’t live without. But getting a washing machine required having a place to put it. A six-flat apartment house wouldn’t do. The thing of it is, a washing machine will not fit in the back seat of a Honda Civic hatchback. Owning a refrigerator, a washing machine and a complex audio system some dweeb talked you into, means you no longer fit the demographic “free and easy”; now you are “middle class.”

I lived in a big city for a while and there was a laundromat in the neighborhood that organized a monthly “date night,” during which we laundry-doers could snack on hors d’oeuvres and wine while waiting for the spin cycle to spit out our “delicates.”

Pass me some of that crab rangoon, please.

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