Laughing at Flip Wilson, stuffing our faces with Screaming Yellow Zonkers, and always, always, always burning the Jiffy Pop popcorn.

On those Thursday nights in the early 1970s, when our parents were out, mom charged her first born, Carole, with the all-but-hopeless task of corralling her four younger brothers — Jim, Matt, Jack and me — and keeping us in line.

(I leave little sister Diane out of the foregoing, as she was never a problem).

I remember well the night Carole had to persuade me when I was being a brat to come out from under the bed.

Beyond that infamous incident, I do not remember her ever being cross with me.

Although the calendar tells me more than 50-plus years have passed since that time, at times I ask myself, wasn’t that only yesterday?

The passage of time has become increasingly hard to grasp as I’ve gotten older. As the late great John Prine wrote, “Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery,” the years “just flowed by like a broken-down dam.”

Anyway, I am writing about Carole here and now because last Saturday she celebrated her 70th birthday. Happy birthday, Carole.

I have been reflecting ever since on all this remarkable sister — I have two remarkable sisters — has meant to me and all of us over the years. It’s more than this page can hold.

Carole was and remains my main source about the 16th and 17th streets Northeast neighborhood as it was when the families and kids who inhabited it were young.

In those days, Mr. and Mrs. Ted Lea and their kids Fred, Tom and Tori lived behind us, the Wolheuters and Carninos lived down the street, and the Moons, Jack, Delores, and their kids Patrick and Teresa lived directly across from us.

The entire Moon family has since passed on, Patrick, notably when he stopped to help a man during the Inauguration Day storm of 1993, and a tree dropped on his head.

Carole was the first of us mom told about our brother Jim’s death in 1975.

She has always been a steadying presence in my life.

As she and I had many conversations about the cosmos, evolution, the Bible, and the person of Jesus over the years, I came to appreciate her well-articulated arguments for Christianity, and how smart my big sister was and remains.

Bit of advice: never get into an argument with her on those subjects — you’ll lose.

I was with her in 1980 at a Keith Green concert — one of many occasions when she and her husband, Galen, dragged the little heathen I was along to Christian events — when I surrendered to God.

Everything changed for the better after that and I have her and her patience to thank for it.

She and I are alike in many ways, smart but scatterbrained, and I suppose that has a lot to do with our close relationship.

So again, happy birthday, Carole. You’re the best.

Robert Whale can be reached at robert.whale@soundpublishing.com.