The boy on the right better learn to tie his shoes before he trips and falls on his face. Been there done that.

Not all of us have lost that instinctive urge to live in the trees. As a child of the age of these, my summers were spent atop our crabapples, plums, cherries, and pecans, happily eating my way from branch to branch. I only ever climbed the persimmon once--yuck!

I all but gave up climbing trees at age 50 when while sitting on a branch about 20 feet from the ground, sawing the branch above, the sawn and falling branch's weight, and my own, were enough to bring my comfortable perch and myself to the ground, left shoulder first. So for the last ten years, I've slept on my right shoulder.

So being older now and not necessarily wiser, but surely not stupider, when my neighbor stepped out to kiss her departing husband goodbye, parrot on shoulder, and the parrot said, "I go bye-bye!" and flew to the top of my 100-foot pecan, I did not offer to climb to retrieve him for the much distressed young woman.

I did, however, set up spotlights and provide additional ropes for the professional tree man she hired, younger and more daring than I, and ultimately, one of my king-sized pillow cases for bagging the bird around 4 a.m.

Surprisingly, the daring climber is the son of a world-famous attorney who prefers following in the footsteps of his ancient primate ancestors to his father's footsteps (not that there's much difference).