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It was a highly ordinary phone call with my 30-something daughter — her plans for the weekend, her struggles with her dog, her need for a new dishwasher.

Then she asked what was new with me.

The call suddenly got very bumpy.

I told my daughter that I had just returned the night before from a business meeting in Pennsylvania. It ended at about 10:30 p.m. Since I’m not made of money, I decided to drive home then and there rather than spring for a hotel.

The drive took about two and a half hours. I made it safely, despite torrential rain, gusty wind, trucks and fatigue.

There was a discernible pause on my daughter’s end of the phone. Then she said: “Daddy, I don’t want you driving by yourself at night anymore.”

I told my daughter — and I will repeat to you, gentle reader — that I am hardly on death’s door.

I am in my mid-70s. My eyesight and my reflexes are as good as ever. Don’t believe me? Squadrons of doctors have said so.

This is not Bob insisting on a membership in Fantasyland. This is Bob who not only knows how to drive, but has known how for a very long time. Neither rain, nor wind, nor anything else will stay Bob from the swift completion of his return home.

Nor does Bob speed. Nor does Bob jump from lane to lane. Nor does Bob forget or refuse to use his directional signals. His last accident was in 1980, and that was a piffle-ish fender bender.

But my daughter wasn’t buying.

“Daddy,” she said, “you are too old to be out there by yourself in the rain in the middle of the night. What would happen if you got sick or had an accident?”

I reached for Reasonable.

“What would happen,” I said, “is the same thing that would happen if I got sick or had an accident at 11 a.m. on a sunny day. I’d call for help. You know that cell phone that you and your mother made me buy? My ace in the hole.”

There was another discernible pause on the other end of the line.

“Daddy,” my daughter said. “I don’t want to take the keys away from you. But we might have to consider that.”

Thus was my family plunged into a drama that has consumed — and fractured — many others.

Here, on the one hand, is Dear Old Dad, for decades the rock and the chauffeur of the family. He is a proud old soul — too proud, probably. But not irrational.

He has always said that he will know when it’s time to stop driving at night. No one will have to tell him.

“It’s like being an aging baseball player,” he has told his family. “No one knows better than he when it’s time to hang up his spikes.”

On the other hand, here are spouses, children, grandchildren, friends, neighbors, co-workers — all of whom care and all of whom possess eyes.

Fine, great, old boy, have all the aging baseball metaphors you like, they say. But truth is truth. On a rainy Interstate highway at midnight, a 70-something guy is bucking the odds.

So I reached for Emotional.

Haven’t I been a safety freak all your life, I asked my daughter? Haven’t I kept our cars in tip-top condition? Haven’t I bent down to inspect all four tires before setting off even on a trip to the grocery?

How can you say that I’m suddenly a risk?

“Because you are. To yourself and others,” my daughter said.

So we compromised. I promised never to drive at night again if the weather is bad, or I am exhausted, or both. She promised not to hector me about it.

We ended the conversation as we always do — with I-love-yous and hope-your-dog-behaves. But then she landed the final punch.

“Daddy,” she said. “I’m going to tell Mom about our conversation. Just so she knows about it.”

The kid isn’t a lawyer. But she maneuvered me into a corner like the best Perry Mason.

If the two women in my life can force me to buy a cell phone, they might be about to force me off the road at night, even when the weather is calm.

I may twist and scream and complain (and I will!). But to stand against the force of these ladies, and against the ravages of time, would be to buck not one set of odds, but two.

Bob Levey is a national award-winning columnist.