There was a time when a $2,497.53 car repair bill would have sent me into a panic.

I measure my own growth and progress by the fact that I did not feel panic.

I felt appreciation and gratitude for Charlie Shissler, our soft-spoken, honest, and relentlessly conscientious mechanic.

I don’t know a lot about Charlie, he is married to an equally nice person named Julie, who works in the shop several days a week answering the phones and preparing bills. He works at Rushinski Automotive, which has garages in Cambridge and Shushan, N.Y.

They have a beautiful one-year old daughter, on whom they both dote. They are wonderful parents, it seems to me, determined to give their daughter the space she needs to grow and the love she needs to be safe.

Charlie is a Vermonter, I would guess, quiet but missing nothing. When he speaks, it counts.

Charlie appreciates my utter ignorance of anything mechanical and still has the heart to try to explain things to me, which he knows is hopeless, but he does because it is the right thing do.

I keep telling him I don’t know what he is talking about,  to just do what he needs to do. He is  undeterred, firm in his conviction to be transparent and tell me what I need to know.

Good luck to him.

I tried to trick  him once and ask him why he hadn’t fixed my carburetor. He looked at me curiously, I didn’t know at the time that cars don’t have carburetors anymore.

Charlie and I got to know each other when I would come into the shop and rage about Maria’s “toilet bowl,” her little Yarus she loved to drive in the snow without snow tires during blizzards. Maria paid no attention to my worries or fits about the car, she made it a point to drive it in blizzards, it finally and blessedly died last year.

At least she will have snow tires now, thanks to Charlie.

She’s getting them on Friday.

When you come across the love of your life, especially later in life,  you do not want to see her driving through blizzards in a toilet bowl with no snow tires. I really hated that car.

Her new one is better.

Charlie thought my toilet bowl harangues were hilarious, especially when Maria yelled at me for insulting her little car. She was protective of it, as if it were a kitten or a lost dog.

Charlie has taken the trouble to ask me what my intentions  are when it comes to my 2011 Toyota Highlander, which has about 150,000 miles on it.

He doesn’t just fix the car, he likes to know something about what I want from it. I want to keep driving it.

The car is special to me.

I got it right  after Maria and I got together, we have been all over the country in this car, from book tours to vacations, it has room for my big head, it is dependable and comfortable, my wish is to keep it for another ten years, or until I die, whichever comes first.

I associate it with her, with us.

That means I have to invest in it.

Life is not free, and I decline to join in the chorus of lament about the cost of things. That is the bane of complaining old men. I don’t wish to go there. The price of things will always go up, I won’t speak poorly of my life.

I have a great car, to keep it I will have to repair it and maintain. That will mean someone like Charlie will be required to work hard to keep it going. I just drive it.

I can see how hard he works, and what it takes, this morning he was under one of those lifts in a pit, water and grease dropping onto his head.

I have no complaints about the price. Charlie’s labor was $606, he is worth every penny and more. He doesn’t have a lot of money lying around either, and he has a small child to feed.

Charlie told me gently that if I were to keep this car, I would need to have new struts an shocks and new year round tires, plus a ball bearing on the left rear of the car. I don’t have $2,500 lying around in the bank, so I put it on the credit card, and will pay it off monthly, and keep my bank account solvent, just like everybody else I know.

I was once a quasi-famous author, I am not famous any more, I am just like everybody else. There are no more big royalty checks. Where I am feels good, the right place for me. I am better at being ordinary than I was being quasi-famous.

I like being an iconoclast, but I do not wish to be a grumpy old man, ever complaining about the good old days, when cars were so simple we could take care of them ourselves. (I wasn’t alive in those good old days, but I hear people – my father included –  talk about them all the time.)

It did take me a long time to figure this way of life out, during my glory days I would just have  written out a check for those repairs and left it to my then wife to figure it all out.

My current wife doesn’t do that for me, bless her, and I wouldn’t want her to. I am learning what love is, and what love isn’t.

But I was appreciating Charlie this morning, and I imagine I will have my beloved car as long as I want. He will do his best to make that happen.

Charlie is the kind of person who reminds me that the world is full of good and honest and hard-working people, people who care about the quality of their work, who take responsibility for what they do, and who I can trust completely to deal with the many elements of the world I know nothing about.

There are men who know how the world works, and men who don’t. You can figure out which kind I am.

We need one another, I think.

Like most writers, I sit on my bottom for much of the day, typing and looking out the window, talking to dogs. I can hardly imagine the hard and dirty work Charlie does, although I benefit from it.

It a turning point for me, to pay a bill like that and not feel the old heart rising in my chest. It will take me a few months, but I will pay it off. Still, it is a big bill.

And as I called Charlie to thank him for the good work he did, the car is running beautifully, the new tires really grip the road, he sad matter- of-factly, “you might start thinking about struts and shocks for the rear in the Spring,” he said. “It will feel like a new car.”

I felt an old twinge, but then I did the math in my head.

It won’t cost $2,500.

The new struts and shocks in the Spring would not involve new tires or a new ball bearing, so it would cost about half as much.

Let’s plan on it, I said, I want to keep the car going.