But the moral was not lost, even on cocky young buckos like ourselves. It could just as well have been a story about George Bush himself. I have no difficulty imagining him down on all fours in a hospital room, mopping up a spill to spare the nurses the trouble. For a multi-armed, omniscient, omnipotent deity, the Vishnu was the kindest, most decent man I’ve ever known.
And the most reticent when it came to self-advertisement. He recoiled from chest thumping, or talking about the ‘Introspection Thing,’ as he called it. This was, after all, a man who’d had had his knuckles rapped by his mum at the Thanksgiving dinner table in 1980.
Mr Bush had been regaling the family with his adventures on the presidential campaign trail. Surely a more interesting as a topic than, say, Cousin Bob’s landing a six-pound brown trout. But Dorothy Bush was having none of it. She interrupted him in mid-story and said, ‘George, stop it. You’re talking about yourself too much.’ The future leader of the free world obediently stopped.
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