If I had a truck engine that wasn’t running right, I’d trust my cousin, Buddy Davis, in Aiken, S.C., to diagnose and fix the problem. Buddy has owned and operated a garage for many years now, and knows what makes an internal combustion engine tick or purr or whatever it’s supposed to do.

If I had a problem with a laptop computer, I’d go to my grandson, Chase Williamson of Marietta, Ga., who will turn 4 in August. When Chase was born, he was given a degree from Microsoft in lieu of a birth certificate and has spent much of his life copying stuff from the Internet and pasting it in his capacious little brain.

The more I commune with my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the more fearsome my inferiority complex becomes. The older I get, the more irrelevant my knowledge and skills seem to be.

Apparently, Cousin Buddy feels the same way, though he was endowed at birth with mechanical skills as well as a gift for language. Somewhere in our ancestral gene pool was a bit of linguistic DNA that helped me make a living for more than 50 years and has made Buddy a talented communicator. Buddy got his mechanical skills from our common grandfather, Pappy Rains, who kept a sturdy oak limb handy in his front yard to support a chain-fall, which he used to hoist the engines out of his well-used vehicles to perform whatever operation was needed to keep them humming. Nowadays, the limb and chain-fall are useless unless they contain a USB port to connect them with the vehicle’s on-board computer.

I became aware of Buddy’s computer challenges when I read a message he managed to post on the family website. It read:

“The few times I have been able to enter this site I have greatly enjoyed the old photographs of my family as they grew up, the old cars and houses, stories of years gone by and how they endured ‘the good old days.’ It is important for me to stay in touch with all, and I do as much as I can to accomplish this.

“However, the few times I have gotten on this site, every time I try, I have to spin backwards, stand  on my head, close my right eye and look out my left eye over my right shoulder while standing on one foot. Frankly, at 62, I am way past begging a piece of plastic to do its job; it claims it can’t remember my name or password. I learned to write before I started to school in 1955, and I wrote all that information down when we first entered this site several years ago, and it’s the same mumbo-jumbo every time I attempt to enter. I am sure that a number of you well-intended souls will feel compelled to respond to this by telling me what I am doing wrong and directing me how to correct my errors. Thank you. Don’t get offended if I don’t respond right away. It takes me at least 15 minutes to get onto this site, and I don’t always have the time or ambition to invest in that. I have at least 25 entries, unopened, on this website. Enough of that. I have to go to work.”

I’m worse off than Buddy, because Pappy’s copious supply of mechanical genes were dispersed among his scores of other progeny, leaving me bereft of everything but the ability to pound a keyboard at roughly 55 words per minute. The only problem with that is the keyboard is about to become obsolete, and I will lose whatever edge I might have had over the average Joe.

Chase, on the other hand, is likely to grow up with an abundance of manual skills inherited from his mom, Miss Peggy’s talented daughter Kim, and his dad, a retired Delta Force sergeant. And he’s already a virtuoso with the laptop and iPad.

We have been at his house for a 10-day stay, during which I’ve had to leave my comfortable desktop computer at home and share Miss Peggy’s laptop, which is slower than my home computer, has a cramped keyboard, and has a more cluttered path to the Internet.

One morning, Miss Peggy, for whom her laptop is a recreational tool, was stranded high and dry without Internet access. Chase was plunking merrily along with his own computer, happily boasting, “I’m on the Internet.”

I should have asked him to pull up the Internet on his grandmother’s laptop, but I didn’t want to endure the humility of having a 4-year-old demonstrate his technical superiority. When Kim came home from work, she showed us the little button that switches the wireless Internet on and off. I apparently had mashed it accidentally, since it lies adjacent to the little button you use to wake up the laptop after it’s been at rest during the night.

During a day trip to Anniston, Ala., to visit Kim’s brother Bobby, I shared the back seat with Chase, who spent the two hours or so thumbing through his mother’s iPad, browsing through educational games and telling me all about dinosaurs and which ones were herbivorous and which ones were carnivorous, while informing me that the solar system contains only eight planets now that Pluto has been downgraded to a dwarf. I was nearly 10 years old before I knew that planets existed outside the Buck Rogers comics and that Pluto was not just a Walt Disney dog.

If these were the old days, Cousin Buddy and I could sit in front-porch rockers in summer or relax by roaring potbellies in the winter, regaling the grandchildren with ancestral lore and imparting to them the knowledge we had accumulated over the years. Nowadays, we have to boot up our computers and let the toddlers instruct us in how to use them.

Write Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625, or email him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.