I drove to the Gulf Coast last week to touch base with my readership down there, visiting old friends and eyeballing a few that I had previously known only by their e-mail handles.

The round trip was something like 1,000 miles, including local driving, and it cost me around $96 in gasoline at $3.20 a gallon — the going rate across Georgia and Alabama. I was driving an ‘06 Honda Civic, and it averaged pretty close to its advertised 40 mpg.

Had I made that trip back in the late ‘50s, when I was driving a Ford V-8 with Fordomatic Drive, it would have cost about $18.75, which would have amounted to about 20 percent of my gross weekly pay. The $96 I spent last week comes to quite a bit less than 20 percent of my current income. So why did it hurt so much each time I poured $32 worth of regular unleaded into my tank? Why did I chafe at averaging 12.5 miles per dollar in my spirited little Honda instead of 52 miles per dollar in my sluggish ‘54 Ford?

It’s because we who grew up in an era of 30-cent-a-gallon gasoline, 15-cent-a-loaf bread and $10-a-month power bills still dwell subconsciously in that world. We are outraged over one-dollar Baby Ruths that aren’t even as large as the 10-cent versions we used to buy. And we regard it as downright immoral to pay $1.29 for a 20-ounce bottle of water and 50 cents to pump air into our tires. We grew up thinking air and water were free. The fact that our incomes are far greater now than they were back then doesn’t matter. If we make $1,000 a week now, we feel cheated when we can’t buy now what $1,000 a week would buy back then. We don’t do the mental math that tells us the $1,000 a week is the equivalent of $100 back then and $3.20-a-gallon gasoline now is equivalent to 32-cent-a-gallon gasoline back then.

Of course, there are many differences between the ‘50s and the present that cloud that picture.

The $100 a week you might have earned back then didn’t have to cover all the things that must be covered by today’s $1,000 a week. It didn’t have to pay for cable television, which gives you a gazillion channels whereas back then you got only three — but they were free.

You didn’t have to pay for high-speed Internet. The volume and speed of communication were far below today’s levels, but you never had it, so you didn’t miss it. A 4-cent stamp would take your message from Fairhope to Montgomery in two or three days, and you didn’t have to deal with tech support people in India who spoke a brand of English incomprehensible to the Alabama ear. It didn’t have to pay the cost of a land line and a cell phone. If you wanted to talk to somebody while you were on the road, Ma Bell was waiting with a pay phone that would take your dime and connect you with the world.

It didn’t have to pay for liability insurance on your automobile. Most of us just took our chances. When hospital beds were $10 a night and most doctor bills didn’t exceed $5 or $10, we didn’t sweat health insurance so much. We could stretch that $100 a week to afford a reasonable amount of sickness. The high-priced testing equipment now necessary to keep death at bay had not yet arrived. So if we got really bad off sick, we just died.

For the most part, we get our money’s worth for the extra dollars we spend today. When my power bill was $10 a month, I didn’t have central air conditioning. In fact, I didn’t have air conditioning. When the telephone bill was $10 a month, I didn’t have call-waiting, voice mail or unlimited long distance. My local calling area probably took in no more than 10,000 households. Long distance was something you used only in emergencies, such as informing your Aunt Lucy in Atmore that Mama was bad off sick.

When I was first married in 1957, I was being paid every two weeks, and each time pay day arrived, my wife and I would high-tail it to the A&P. We usually spent $18 or so and needed that ‘54 Ford to haul it home. No wonder I’m shocked to see the check-out person ring up more than $18 when I go into the local super market and walk out with a couple of plastic bags of staples that I can easily carry back to the apartment on foot. But I eat steak more often now than I did back then.

Maybe the answer is to re-set the dollar so that its value is back where it was in 1955. That would mean adjusting our incomes proportionately. We wouldn’t make very much, but look at the purchasing power — 87-octane unleaded for 31.9 cents a gallon.

But nah. In a year or two, the price would go up to 41.9 cents a gallon and we’d be on our way again.

Buy yourself an economy sedan. Twelve and a half miles to the dollar ain’t half bad when you’re living on a 2008 income.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson, S.C. 29621, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com.