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KENNEBUNKPORT, Maine -- He wants to see the Houston Astros play in the World Series, which is possible this year.
He wants to see the Houston Texans in the Super Bowl, perhaps a few years off. Mostly he wants to ride the high-speed rail train from Houston to Dallas, which won't be ready until 2023.
George H.W. Bush is a 93-year-old with a formidable bucket list. He's confined to a wheelchair, and his wife, Barbara, uses a walker and a motorized scooter.
The other day Jean Becker, his chief of staff, told him the high-speed rail project in Texas might not be completed until he is 99. "I'm in,'' he told her.
Nearly four decades ago, Bush, energy and urgency personified, campaigned for president by asserting he was ''up for the '80s.''
The 41st president, now America's most beloved senior citizen and its most respected senior statesman, is still upbeat.
Ask question and he says, ''Sure.''
Ask another and he answers, ''Yes!'' Follow up with a third and he asks, "Why not?"
He's back here, in Maine, in the grand compound once known as the Summer White House, still a tourist destination attracting dozens of visitors to a wayside viewing area a quarter-mile away. The surf crashes against the concrete wall, the mallards gather on the grassy slope.
For most of his life he has come here in summertime, walking the rocky beach at the base of the point, cruising the inlets in a cigarette boat that still takes him a few times each summer south to the beach town of Ogunquit, there to have a shore dinner overlooking tranquil Perkins Cove.
The sun rises on America here. During Bush's presidency, from 1989 to 1993, the gray clapboard house on Walker's Point with its breathtaking ocean views was an unrivaled seaside power center.
John Major of Great Britain, Brian Mulroney of Canada, Yitzhak Rabin of Israel, Lech Walesa of Poland, and King Hussein of Jordan--all figures now of history, some only dimly remembered--were feted here, felt the bracing breezes here, smelled the salt air here.
Years later, when his son, George W. Bush, was president, Vladimir Putin of Russia walked the promontory that juts into the icy Atlantic here. Later the three presidents went fishing. The eldest president, then a mere 83, pushed the boat, a little perilously, to top speed. Until recently it was the only speed he knew.
Now the speed is gone from Mr. Bush, and now the guests tend to be family members. The other day, the clouds low and the Maine sky a frosty, forbidding gray, Bush, wearing a royal blue sweater and expertly pressed khakis, was in his office.
Outside, his daughter, Doro, pulled up in a car with a load of supplies.
Former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, in plaid shorts and a light gray T-shirt, strolled by. "He's slowed down but he's still got his game, and he's still telling jokes,'' the younger Bush said. Then he added: "Both my mom and dad are special people.''
Bush is the last of a breed, the sort that celebrates breeding but that also prizes public service and makes way, in time and with grace and generosity, for the new and for the unfamiliar, sometimes even the uncomfortable.
That, above all, was Bush's ideology.
"He is the personification of a great citizen,'' said Andrew H. Card, transportation secretary under the first President Bush and White House chief of staff under the second.
"His health is not good, and for the most part he is disabled,'' said Marlin Fitzwater, the former Bush press secretary who visited recently. "Yet just being around him and knowing what he stands for is inspirational.''
And ironic, for here in coastal Maine, where the sun first hits American soil, its oldest president is in his sunset years.