I spent much of this fine, breezy springtime day helping my dad take down a tree that was overhanging the Bennion Compound’s property line. He’s become increasingly concerned over the past couple years about a branch coming down on the patio furniture at the rec center next door, and the potential damages he doesn’t want to be liable for.

At one point, as he was trying to gingerly back his way up a near-vertical limb that he once would have just fearlessly Tarzaned, he stopped, wiped his brow, and said to me, “I guess it’s pretty silly for a 70-year-old man to be scrambling around a tree like this.?”

“Yeah, it is,” I agreed.

Cramming his hat back on his snowy-white hair, he responded, “Good thing I’m not 70 yet, isn’t it?”

And that’s not even the funniest thing he said to me today. That came first thing this morning, when he asked me for my help. “This should only take an hour,” he said…