The New York Yo-Yo Club typically meets at the Washington Square Arch during the warm weather months. But rain threatened last Wednesday so they convened at their winter location, the atrium at 120 Park Ave.

Much, I quickly discovered, has changed since my days as a yo-yo owner and user. For the record mine was a translucent Duncan yo-yo, a model that comes in a glorious spectrum of colors.

Indeed, it constituted something of a fad at my school. It came and went in a matter of weeks, as most fads do, but left an indelible impression.

The essence of that impression is that a yo-yo is a thing of beauty. The ability to drop it almost to the ground (all the way if you’re “walking the dog”) and have it return being on the order of a miracle, an opportunity for the average 8-year-old to interface with the mysterious forces of the universe.

Thus it came as a shock when I arrived at the New York Yo-Yo Club meet-up and discovered that yo-yo technology had undergone radical changes since my youth. It’s as if they’ve progressed from a manual typewriter to a MacBook Air without anybody telling me.