Spring is in the air. You can see signs of it everywhere ”“ the grass seed commercials on TV, the Miracle-Gro commercials on TV, the allergy commercials on TV, my baseball team losing on TV and the grocery stores selling plastic lawn furniture once again. Sue said something about flowers and birds, but I really wasn’t listening.

But the real sign that spring is here is that I got my snow tires removed yesterday. The guy at the garage gave me a funny look and said, “Well, someone’s got to be first.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “It’s 70 degrees out. Any snow that falls from now on would be an absolute freak of nature. How often could that happen?”

The guy at the garage shook his head and looked at me as if I were being incredibly brave or incredibly foolish to go back to regular road tires. I get the “you’re incredibly foolish” look from people all the time, so I’m used to it. The “you’re incredibly brave look”? Not so much. Never, actually.

These snow tires have lasted me four or five winters now, and it seems they’ll be good for four or five more. Tires last forever now. Everybody thinks the big changes in our lives over the last 40 years have been high-tech ones. Home fax machines, home computers, the Internet, hundreds of channels on cable TV, cellphones. But there have been some great low-tech changes, too. Have you noticed that you almost never have to change a flat tire anymore? I’ve owned cars for years that never had a single flat tire.

When I was a teenager, tires were always going flat. It seemed every other time I drove the family car somewhere I got a flat. Four of my friends were late for our senior prom because they had to stop and change flat tires ”“ in their rented tuxedos. And this was in the days before Handi Wipes. It’s hard to imagine anything dirtier than a tire. If you changed a tire, you got filthy. Dirt, grease, road kill, cigarette butts, spit. It’s a DNA festival all over your hands, getting on everything you touch: the door handle, the steering wheel, the gearshift, the prom dresses.

We all got pretty good at jacking up the car and putting on the spare. You’d take the flat to the gas station, and the owner or the mechanic would find the leak, repair it and throw it back in the trunk. That’s all gas stations did then: sell gas and fix cars. There was no candy, no magazines, no coffee, no doughnuts, no tables and chairs, no lattes, no Snapples, no hot cashews, no hot dogs, no pizza slices, no made-to-order sandwiches, no bagels, no lottery tickets. If you were lucky, they’d have a soda machine out front.

The last place you’d go to fix a flat today would be a gas station. The gas station is where you’d go to eat lunch and read a newspaper after you called AAA on your cellphone to send someone over to fix your flat tire. A gas station is where you go to buy cigarettes and beer, not to get your tire fixed.

You could try to fix a flat yourself, if you knew where they hid spare tires in modern cars. I’ve had my car five years, and I’ve never seen it. It’s in the back somewhere. Under something. And would you know how to use those new jacks? The ones that look like fancy nutcrackers? As if that tiny, little thing is really going to lift your car. As if you could get the lug nuts off with the little toy tire iron that comes with new cars.

When I got home from the garage, Sue asked me to run over to the gas station to pick up some bread and milk.

It’s supposed to snow tonight.

— Jim Mullen takes a wry, witty look at the curiosities of American life in his weekly column. Almost everything is fair game ”“ from the price of a cup of coffee, to shopping at big-box stores, to the perplexing lifestyles of the rich and famous. Contact Jim Mullen at JimMullenBooks.com.