My grandfather used to tell me about what it was like during the Depression. He grew up in the Kansas “dust bowl”. His parents died when he was young and he got shuttled between aunts. He dropped out of high school a month before graduation after an argument with the principal, so he got on his motorcycle and took off. He ended up tending cattle in the mountains of Colorado on horseback for a year for pennies a day. He eventually went back to his hometown to pick up my grandmother as she graduated high school and they went to Los Angeles (Compton, specifically – at one time it was a white, lower class town for shipyard workers before it got it’s current black “hip hop rep”). He worked in the shipyards through the end of WWII.

Nothing I’ve had to live with was as bad as what he had to survive so I’ve considered myself lucky.