WASHINGTON

I FLEW down to Houston last year to have lunch with George Herbert Walker Bush.

“Did you come because you think I’m going to die?” he asked me with a wry smile.

Not at all, I replied, adding that I wanted to join him on his planned sky-diving excursion when he turned 90. (It sends the world a message, as he puts it, that “old guys can still do exciting things.”)

It made me sad to see him in a wheelchair, his lower legs weakened by Parkinsonitis. He had once been so kinetic that the Chinese press described him as “ants on a hot pan,” and his golf game was so manic that W. dubbed it “golf-polo.”

But 41 can still drive his cherished cigarette boat, Fidelity IV, in Kennebunkport, and he was very much himself over pizza at his favorite Houston dive: racy jokes, no airs, ever gracious.