I’m out of town, visiting my mother, and I’m using her car to run errands. I don’t know the radio stations here, so I go through her six presets, passing up the pop noise and political rants until I find PBS. But it’s Pledge Week, with all its highbrow yakety-yak. Where’s the Starbucks Channel? BBC? Oprah and Friends? The Heart? Oh, right, those are XM stations. This is my 84-year-old mother’s twelve-year-old car.

No problem. I reach in my purse for my iPod, but realize that I left the connecting device in my own car. I can’t listen to the latest James Lee Burke mystery or sing along with Bono or feel the majesty of Mozart’s Coronation Mass. It’s going to be a long drive.

I stop at WalMart to pick up a new remote control for Mum, because the one she uses for her little twenty-year-old kitchen TV refuses to channel up or down, and there’s no onscreen digital guide. How does she live without the Guide? Or a DVR? She actually knows the day and time of her favorite shows! This is admirable, but sitting through the commercials!? Puh-leeze! And God forbid the phone should ring during Mystery and I can’t hit the pause button and the whole show is ruined.

Oddly, this lack of Essential Features does not leave my mother feeling deprived.

It also doesn’t bother her to live without Caller ID or Call Waiting. You want to know who’s calling you, she says, you pick up the phone. You get a busy signal? You call back later. And what is so important about email and the mysterious internet that I have to lug my laptop to Panera every day to find a connection? Who would want dozens of email messages every day? Isn’t there enough junk in the mailbox?

Techno-glut isn’t the only difference between our lifestyles. There’s the embarrassing number of bags I unload for my three-day visit. My bulging bathroom travel case contains more stuff than Mum’s entire bathroom. Then there’s my main suitcase; my shoe bag; my book bag; my laptop; my electronics bag (digital camera, charger, iPod, charger/speaker, headphones, phone charger [wall], phone charger [car], laptop mouse, flash drive, power cord, spare batteries and portable GPS). Somehow my mother manages to live happily without all this paraphernalia. She’s also strangely healthy for a woman who doesn’t take any pills, and bewildered by the many I take every day. How on earth has this woman lived to be 84?

Then there’s her coffee pot. Her old Mr. Coffee was acting up, so I bought her a new coffee maker with a carafe so the coffee doesn’t burn. But she didn’t like the way it poured, so I tried another multi-featured pot, but she didn’t like that either. Finally I bought a Mr. Coffee just like the one she had, with all the features she wants: Off, On, and the luxurious Delay Brew. And really, it is a good match for the Maxwell House coffee she buys. Me, I sneak out to Starbucks for a hit of Cinnamon Dolce Latte Skim, one “tall” cup of which costs more than her supply for a week.

Oh the life we live, with its ever-multiplying “necessities,” each with new and improved features and its own 80-page manual to study. Being at Mother's also reminds me of the number of things we now pay for that were once free, or at least cost much less. But I guess it's worth it, since they "improve" our lives so much. XM Radio (I use five of the 170 channels). Hi-Def, flatscreen, five-speaker TVs with premium cable and DVR. Subscriptions for audiobooks and movies. Telephones with CW, CID, talking CID, CWCID, one-touch dialing, digital voice, voice recognition, Call Forwarding.

“Essential” kitchen appliances whose functions are so specific they’re used only once or twice a year. An oven so loaded with features that I need the manual every time I cook. A cabinet full of vitamins and health supplements instead of a healthy diet. Hundreds of dollars worth of exercise equipment, ditto. Bottled water instead of tap. Starbucks instead of Maxwell House. Enough remotes and telephones to open a store. Three computers for two people, all with flat screens and wireless mice and high-speed internet. Our Comcast bill is more than the mortgage payment on our first house.

Oh, for the featureless contentment of my mother.