I can empathize with Joe Biden’s situation – somewhat. When he was born in November of 1942, I had been aggravating my parents for six years already.

While I’m not running (and could never be considered) for president, I understand what it is to be groping for a word or a name that won’t come to mind when I need it.

Old age often means losing memory and getting arthritis – at least for many.

Joe and I probably have that in common. Our memories of our growing up years aren’t that bad. Growing up in the 30s, 40s and 50s was not all that challenging.

Everybody seemed to have enough to eat and those who wanted one had a job.

Although we fed a few hobos who dropped by our country abode for free meals, homelessness didn’t seem to be a serious problem.

Penicillin had been invented by the time I was in junior high school so the need had dropped for graves for children who had died of some malady that would have been curable with a shot of some new wonder drug.

Movies and music were clean.

We were shocked at the movie, “Blackboard Jungle,” which told of the horrors of drug use by school age kids. We supposed that sort of thing just occurred in places like New York City or Chicago.

There was no “weed” that we ever heard about in our community, other than those we chopped out of crops or fence rows.

The teachers and principals in school seemed like our masters. And they were while we were at school. A student didn’t ever want the word to reach back home that he had acted out at school.

You didn’t want your parents to learn that you had gotten swatted at school, even for some mundane thing like a snowball fight at recess, especially after we’d been warned not to do it.

But, hey, a snow deep enough to provide a substantial, throwable snowball was a terrible temptation in western Oklahoma.

Joe and I grew up mostly after the end of World War II. America had about the only dependable industrial capacity after Europe and much of Asia had been destroyed in the war.

Rock ‘n’ roll created some cultural issues later. We didn’t face a coronavirus pandemic then. China hadn’t become a world power due to America sending it much of its industrial base and hadn’t delved into the area of crippling and killing biological pandemics.

However, it wasn’t all sugar and spice. Polio, before the Salk vaccine, was a concern, especially in the summer.

Our mother was convinced the disease was spread at the swimming pool, so we didn’t go much – for lack of money as much as fear of ending up in leg braces or the “iron lung.”

Our class mourned when one of its members, Danny Mains, a class favorite and budding basketball star, died of the dreaded disease. When we met his high school girlfriend, now a grandmother, at a class reunion, tears sprang to her eyes when Danny was mentioned.

And, if you can believe it, we must have been experiencing early-onset “global warming” during those times.

The period from 1951 to 1957, was a time of fierce, unrelenting heat and drought. We recall chopping cotton (weeds, not the cotton) when the thermometer in our garage registered 113 degrees after lunch. (It probably was warmer than the official temperature, but it sure burned the soles of your feet as you walked the seemingly endless cotton rows, looking forward to ending your round so you could get a drink of lukewarm water from the burlap-wrapped jug hanging on the fence. (Joe probablynever did that.)

We felt sorry for the ranchers who used flame-throwers to burn the stickers off the prickly pears in Texas so their cattle would have something to eat.

Our parents had more concerns than just living through the hot, dry spell. They had to make a living for five growing children. Somehow they did.

That reminds me of the little joke that old-timers in Harmon County liked to tell – about how when it rained for 40 days and 40 nights (as in the Bible), they got a quarter inch.

We never heard of a riot. We think most people had the same idea that Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl ascribed to: there are two races of people, the decent and the indecent (and, our personal take, there seems to be a considerable degree of shading of good and bad traits among both kinds).

We grew up listening to Harry Belafonte’s velvet voice on the radio.

Integration of schools began the year after we graduated from high school. We didn’t give it much thought when it happened.

However, we have thought since then that it was not handled as well as it might have been. If all students could have chosen the school they wanted to attend, many good black schools could have continued to provide solid edu-cations for those who were happy where they were. Total integration would have occurred anyway probably, but it would have been a gradual, less contentious process. (Nobody asked us, of course. Borrowing a phrase from our late friend, Dr. Jim Vineyard; our opinion won’t buy you many potatoes.)

But back to Joe.

We’ve already made our first wrong prediction this election season (at least in oir mind). We didn’t think Joe would be allowed to represent his party in this election, given “our” memory problems. But we have to give Joe this; he hasn’t referred to the “77 states”, as his predecessor did … yet, or even the Marine “Corpse” as President Obama did on national TV.