Clearly, I am out of step with the times. I recall, when I was a child, being amused at the way my octogenarian grandmother referred to cars as “machines.” Since she was born before the Civil War, her terminology, however, was probably reasonable.

Now I am an octogenarian who doesn’t know the difference between a smart phone and an iPhone, nor do I really know what an app is or how one texts. But the time has come, clearly, when I must mend my ways. I learned that on a recent trip to Stoughton.

I had an appointment with an optometrist at New England Sinai and it was easy enough to take the commuter train from South Station to Stoughton. I had phoned the hospital before I left to ask if it was within walking distance of the train station. They said it would be a three-mile walk and suggested I take a taxi. But when I arrived in Stoughton and tried calling a taxi on my flip-top cell phone, no one answered. The Stoughton Bakery was nearby, so I went in to ask if someone there might have a phone number for another Stoughton taxi service.

The Chinese-American baker in the Portuguese Stoughton Bakery checked for other taxi services on his smart phone. He called several, both in Stoughton and neighboring communities, but only one answered from a neighboring town. They said it would take 40 minutes for one of their taxis to get to Stoughton. My appointment was in 25 minutes and the doctor had come in from the North Shore. I was sure he wouldn’t want to cope with rush hour traffic going home if I ended up being late.

Didn’t I have an Uber or a Lyft account, the baker wanted to know. I murmured that I didn’t own a smart phone. The baker looked surprised and said taxi companies were all closing down because of Uber and the Lyft. Then he said he would call his wife and ask her to drive me to the hospital.

A few minutes later, the baker’s wife arrived and we set off. She wasn’t sure exactly where the hospital was, although she lived in Stoughton. She, too, was a bit out of step with the times for her car had no GPS.

While we looked for the hospital, we talked about China’s coronavirus outbreak and how her sister-in-law lived in Wuhan, where the outbreak began, and was forbidden to leave her house. I told her I had visited China long ago, but not Wuhan. It turned out, however, that I had been in Tientsin, where her family was from. I thanked her profusely when she finally deposited me at the door of New England Sinai, and wished I had bought more than pistachio cookies from her husband back at the bakery.

The doctor visit was a follow-up for a cataract operation. All was well, the doctor said, and I was ready for a cataract operation on the other eye. But by the time he was through with the examination, it was almost 5 p.m. He asked how I was getting back to the train. I said that I would ask the receptionist to call me a taxi. He said he would go down to the receptionist’s desk with me.

There, the receptionist, like the baker, called every taxi company with a phone listing in Stoughton and its environs. No one answered anywhere.

“But, surely,” the receptionist said, “you can call an Uber or a Lyft.”

I explained that I couldn’t since I didn’t have a smart phone. The doctor and receptionist looked surprised that I was so out of step with the times.

I said I could walk back to the station (not telling them that I knew it was three miles away, it was dark and I was hauling a mini-suitcase).

But even though the doctor lived on the North Shore and only visited Stoughton once every two weeks, he knew the hospital was far from the town center. He looked at his watch and sighed and said he’d go back up to his office and take off his white coat and get his outdoor coat and, under the circumstances, shift from being a doctor to being my taxi driver. Neither one of us knew then how long he was going to be my taxi driver.

The receptionist gave us quick directions to get to the train. They proved impossible to follow. We crossed the train tracks twice in each direction looking for the railway stop.

“Look,” the doctor said after our fourth crossing. “There it is. I know train stations when I see them. I’m an electric train collector. There it is, that old stone structure. That’s what all the train stations look like in my electric train sets!”

He was right, but the old stone station was locked up tight and looked, as we peered through the windows, as if it had been closed up for decades.

By then, of course, there were virtually no pedestrians on the streets. Finally, we managed to learn from a woman walking her dog where the working platform was located that I had left from earlier in the day.

The almost-last commuter train to Boston pulled in just as I walked up the ramp with my luggage. As I looked out the train window, I could see my kindly doctor trying to find out from someone in a car how to get to Route 138 so he could finally drive home to the North Shore.

I guess it is time for me to find out about apps and texting. And I sympathize with my grandmother calling cars “machines.”