In case you’ve wondered about my absence, well, my computer died. I know the flaw in temporal causality. That Even B follows Event A doesn’t mean Event A caused Event B. But I blame Windows 10.

For months I’d been refusing all pop-ups offering me Windows 10 because I’d been warned it was an invitation to disaster. Then one afternoon I walked into my study and my computer announced it was almost through installing it. I called my IT guy, Steve the Great, knowing he would accuse me of having clicked the wrong click. “You won’t believe me,” I said. He believed me. I was the fourth person in 36 hours to call him with the same problem. It seemed Windows had modified its pop-up. Windows 10 was no longer an option. It was coming unless you stopped it.

(Windows slips these pop-ups into its mostly helpful up-dates. Even if you know the code that identifies Windows 10 and remove it, it will come back at you. “Unconscionable,” Steve said.)

Windows 10 and my two/three-year-old, never-sick-a-day-in-its-life Dell co-existed happily for about a week. Death came suddenly and without warning. Steve took 10 days to resurrect it. I lost a few hundred e-mails I had saved for sentimental and other reasons in my Inbox. “The good news,” Steve said, “is you don’t have Windows 10 any more.”