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The things I remember most are the cartoons. They came rolling in, in batches of 10 or 20 during his last months, with a tiny allusion to the McLuhan Foundation in the return address: 22 Sanderson's Way, matching up with St Joseph's Street's new name in Toronto, McLuhan's Way. During my overnight privileges in Marshall McLuhan's office, with the occasional unwelcome bat, or my surreptitious existence on the basement floor below that, looking as if I'd just broached a cask of Amontillado it was always 96 St. Joseph St, a combination of numbers that superstitious Mac valued, much like Vat 69, while I was working for him as his secretary and research assistant back in 1959. Perhaps they'll name a cellar or a sidewalk after me. There was a sidewalk at St. Mike's with Mac's name on it. It read, "When I grow up, I want to be like Marshall McLuhan, when he grows up."

MacSween Lives! George didn't talk about his medical problems. Just a laconic note at the bottom of a page referring to a Halifax hospital, an aneurism and a by-pass. I had earlier written him a fan-letter headlined "MacSween Lives," in the wake of which several volumes of Father Rod MacSween's poetry and stories arrived in the mail, unbidden and heavy with life. They became my Prime, my first reading and meditation for each day, their religious impulse hidden in the life of each moment.

Tickling the Tail of the Dragon. When St. George was dropped from the Roman liturgical calendar (not because he was a Syrian, for we still boast of St. Ephraim, a deacon and a poet who is indeed a Doctor of the Church) George was asked what he thought about it, and he replied, "I'm not worried if people no longer believe in him. I'll get worried when the Dragons stop believing in him." The devils too believe, and tremble. Or as Mary Flannery O'Connor might say, it scares the Hell out of them.

The Rolling Estonians. George's cartoons kept coming, including one about Archimedes that evoked the admiration of Martin Gardner, the columnist for the Scientific American that Sir Arthur C. Clarke calls "a national treasure." I fired one back about the same figure, showing Archimedes in the bath proclaiming, "I've found it! I've found it!" A little old lady walking by replies, "Well, just put it right back, young man. Put it right back!" One of George's cartoons shows an Eastern European folk band in native costumes trying to handle saxophone and drums, with the caption "The Rolling Estonians."

Pablum Picasso. The cartoon that stays in my mind (as George does) is the one that I showed to all my friends, and tried to get him to send to the New Yorker, whose rejection slips I enjoyed receiving fifty years ago, and still do. The cartoon shows a somewhat apoplectic baby sitting in a high chair, round faced, almost bald and playing with his food. Splatters of porridge run over his food tray like so many melted watches. Colourful gobs of apricot and plum and apple sauce decorate the kitchen walls. Can it be a baby picture of Brendan? The infant gazes triumphantly at his empty wooden spoon, as the caption reads, predictably enough, "Pablum Picasso." A classic.

Surf's Up, Babe! I tried to persuade George (as I had many years earlier unsuccessfully tried to persuade Saturday Evening Post cartoonist Ted Key, who was kind enough to write back) that we send in some joint submissions. As Brian Gable can tell you, I've got lots of cartoon ideas, but when it comes to drawing, I'm basically in the same Happy Face league that my son Tim was at the age of five, when he first began to draw snails in Sudbury. When Inco poured its Niagara Falls-like cascade of slag, he would yell out every night from our kitchen picture window, "Inco's on!"

There was one cartoon idea that I treasured, and passed along to Walter Alvarez at Berkeley as a possible T-shirt. On the shore of the Gulf of Mexico, a large Texas Tyrannosaurus is smiling toothfully at his smaller mate, holding his surf board at the ready. An asteroid has just landed somewhere in Yucatan (in fact, the asteroid, 65 million years ago) and a tidal wave half a kilometer high is seen approaching. With whetted appetite, Big Daddy T-Rex bellows, "Surf's up, Babe!" And so it goes. The blackboard chalk that we use today to write about the Cretaceous extinction is a tiny product of that same terrific disaster. But then, university blackboards themselves have experienced the thrill of extinction at the hand of the felt-tip marker.

Meeting the Master. My first contact with The Antigonish Review came shortly after the election of St. FX old boy Brian Mulroney, when the Canada Council suddenly became more generous with its gift subscription fund, helping to expand TAR's circulation beyond Canada and into the literary world at large. Its NAFTA agreement also helped expand my circulation beyond the Canadian border, as a commuting professor of literature and communications, teaching at Niagara University, NY where McLuhan's co-author, Bruce R. Powers (The Global Village, Oxford) started the school's media department. Impressed by Bruce W. Powe's articles on McLuhan and Frye, I wrote George comparing BWP's insights into the McLuhan and Pound tradition. Pound had sent me a couple of letters from St. Elizabeth's in the summer of 1957, when I was on a fellowship at Ransom's Kenyon School of Letters. I'd sent him a parody of his famous parody of Sumer is i-cumen in (Summer has come in) where "Loude sing cuckou" became progressively, Pound's "Dammit, sing Godamm!" Keogh's "Dogpound it, Sing Dogpound!" Pound's reply was more forthright: "All-edged stew-dents beware beaneries and brainwash" (Pound's staple insult for the universities) and urging me to subscribe for a dollar to Noel Stock's Australian EDGE. Pound's second letter was bleaker, arriving in dark November, simply a mimeographed copy of Sir Edward Coke's definition of "misprision of treason," and assuredly not referring to his own. I made an unsuccessful attempt in Washington to get Pound to record a reading on my Ampex (Caedmon Press was more successful that same summer, perhaps because they brought him a provolone, which he came back swinging the next day, saying they were bribing him!) Not long after this, Mac got a letter from Pound ending with a valediction lamenting his media studies and research into popular culture, "Cordially, as if descending through the shades to visit with McL." McLuhan's letter rated the full Chinese seal, stamped in red ink. I got a huge "EP" scrawled with red crayon.

I had no regrets for my parodic activities, for in Mr. Pound's very own ABC of Reading, which Mac had introduced to me back in 1955, Pound mentions the modes of critical analysis, among which can be found "Parody." Thus you get Monty Python's Flying Circus, an attempt to parody the whole bloody BBC, beginning with RAF aviation slang, and Apollo's twin-peaked Mount Parnassus, Python and all. Rosy-fingered Dawn has been quite definitely caught red-handed. Or to put it another way, "Sempiternal, though sodden towards sundown / The sun never sets on the British teapot." Sodden, incidentally, is the medieval past participle of seethe, the fate of all Empire. Like Joyce's Wake, parody is encyclopedic. Mr. Prufrock's Big City Blues. As you might expect, the onslaught of TARs prompted me, the new TAR-baby on the block, to send letters to George about the journal, one of which concerned McLuhan's unpublished insights into Eliot's Prufrock. Sixty years after Eliot had been born in St. Louis, McLuhan had taught there at the Jesuit St. Louis University, and knew the city well, including one of Eliot's dancing school partners; although he didn't mention the yellow smog, a product of the city's reliance on high-sulphur Southern Illinois coal, that metamorphoses into a yellow cat in "Prufrock.'' What he did mention in all his classes at St. Mike's was his conviction that the "love-song" of Mr. Prufrock was none other than the influence of the world-famous St. Louis Blues in the central part of the poem ("I have known them all, already, know them all.") Half-way through my letter to George, I realized it was no longer a letter, but an article. I immediately shifted into double-space, and informed George of the reason for this abrupt shift. The first draft was accepted by return mail.

O City, city! Thus began a twenty year association with TAR as writer and reviewer, perhaps culminating in my piece on Thomas Merton as monk of letters: "for with one shock the whole quest is ended." Little did I suspect that my article on Oedipus in the Waste Land would have its own eremetic aspect, and yet desert waste land is the traditional place to find a desert Father. St. Jerome himself was one ("Hieronymo's mad againe") who felt that human society was the real desert (solitudo mundus). But like other Eliot explicators, I failed to notice that the very first speaker in the tragedy of Sophocles, where the Priest in the prologue describes the plague-stricken city of Thebes, calls the city an ereme, a desert wasteland. Similar was Eliot's influenza-ridden London in 1918. Both hermit and hermitage derive from that Greek word, which describes a catastrophic pandemic in which the germs did the socializing.

The Screaming Hassock. I first met George in person at a charming hardwood residence near Upper Canada College, at a book launch for Bruce Powe's A Climate Charged, many of whose articles had appeared in TAR. People circulated. I saw Jim Coutts teaching someone how to write "Merry Christmas" in Chinese, while warmly looking on, like a white woolen Teddy, was Jane Jacobs. I was busy tamping tobacco in my pipe, chatting with an old friend whose father had once run a national news magazine, my right foot propped up on a near-by hempen hassock to steady my weighty mass, waiting for the order from the captain to slip cables.

Suddenly, a piercing scream, as if I'd stepped on the foot of Venus Anadyomene. It was the lady of the house, rescuing her beloved hassock from my beastly feet. For in fact, it wasn't a hassock at all (I was told) but a muffet-shaped "rope-sculpture," with rope heavy enough to dock the Queen Mary. It looked quite massive enough to look after itself, but there was its mistress, perhaps creator, ready to defend it from monsters like me. Indeed its mistress looked like she'd like to have wrapped a few feet of it around my neck. I moved cautiously away, trying to put warm and wooly Jane Jacobs between myself and the offended host. I then began to notice other such alien hempen forms scattered through the rooms like protective fetishes. Suddenly, standing beside me with his back to the wall, looking like an abandoned wall-flower, but smiling plumply at me, was someone I was introduced to as George Sanderson (which means "Alexander's son" in Scottish). I had a protector hero after all, someone to help me survive the Night of the Hassocks, the only thing was, I couldn't think of a thing to say to him, being naturally voluble only on paper. What does the speechless anchorite do, once tracked down as the only begetter of a message in a bottle? Perhaps look for another bottle. A fuller one. Could this be the man I had written to during all those months as "Geo. Anderson?" Sometimes I had gotten in response letters addressed to "Jeo. Keogh," always assuming them to be typographical errors. Or had the joke been turned on Gioco? Or was it Giocchio? Eventually I realized that George preferred George to Geo.

Let These Stones Live. George was a university-trained geologist (McGill) who as a young man made many trips into the Northern wilderness on survey missions. He had worked with the coprolites of long-dead dinosaurs (fossil feces) and one of his cartoons proclaims this expertise, a large tyrannosauros sporting a T-Rex T-shirt. They were feces turned to stone perhaps by the very Medusa that gave them birth. Study them carefully enough, and you know what to feed your pet baby dino, who may still be larger than your living room. Perhaps it was George's scientific bent that led him to commission a page or two of McLuhan-type "probes" from this writer, apropos the East African rift and what I eventually termed Geo-theology, something that even the fans of L. Ron Hubbard seem to have passed by.

Geo-Keogh. Around 1995 I'd seen an article in the Scientific American by the head of Anthropology at Paris' Collège de Sorbonne, stating that about eight million years ago, climate changes near the East African rift seem to have led some fruit-eating primates in the Western highland rain-forests to descend into the grassy savannah lands of the rift valley. Their diet changed, for fossil evidence of upright-walking homo robustus shows evidence of grain-eating molar wear. I was amazed, even stunned to learn this, for these pre-human creatures, for whatever reason, appear to have been acting out the primal drama of Adam and Eve. In Chaldean, even the name Eden means savannah land. But why would a shade-loving fruit-eating primate forsake a cool and moist rain-forest for a sunny savannah, there to eat grain by the sweat of his or her brow? Like any theological amateur, I immediately plugged this story into what I knew of other theologically and geologically significant places, feeling more like Velikovsky as I went on. I presented the list to George in more or less the following form, and to my astonishment, he commissioned a page of probes (I shall not call them "issues") on the subject for TAR:

1. Our primate ancestors leave shady, highland fruit-trees, and cross the East African rift to become bi-pedestrian grain-eaters, eastward into Eden.

2. In flight from Egypt's Pharaoh (an Egyptian word that means "Big House" or Palace - cf. "The White House said today …") a subjugated people flees across the Red Sea's continuation of the East African rift, amid tsunami-like convulsions of the sea, such as reverse tidal waves, first sucking the land bare, then flooding it.

3. Crossing the continuation of the Red Sea rift (which some day may spawn a new Atlantic or Indian ocean) Joshua and his followers re-enter the Jordan valley over a dry river-bed. (Geological evidence reveals the damming action of similar landslides in the past history of the valley, caused by earthquakes.)

4. John the Baptizer crosses the Jordan to preach and baptize among the Amorites. His disciple Joshua (i.e. Jesus) reverses John's journey, to return to Judea across the rift, and begin his public life.

5. Joshua passes the night on the Mount of Olives, a mountain whose description in Zechariah 14 includes mention of a transform fault, where one part of the mountain moves north, and the other moves south.

6. The crucifixion death of Christ on Golgotha was followed, according to reports, by earthquake-like tremors and the opening of graves. Can an earthquake herald good as well as ill? It seems to have done so in the case of Moses' Exodus. Another report had it that the veil of the Temple was rent in two, a literal Apo-kalupsis or Re-velation (un-veiling).

7. In the forthcoming new Atlantic, the Sinai peninsula, keystone-shaped, may well become "the stone that the builders rejected," i.e. become the cornerstone. Does this suggest yet another new discipline, Theo-tectonics?

Such, at any rate, were the probes that George wanted to publish in TAR, and which my nicotine-stained hands never got to retype from its epistolary state among the Sanderson papers.

Réprise. I can't imagine what would have happened to my research and writing career without George. Before George (and his Dragon) I'd had articles published by McLuhan, in Exploration and translated and published by his friend Jacques Ellul in his Paris revue, Foi et Vie. But I didn't have an editor, someone who expected a continuous flow of occasional objects, whether reviews, critiques, annotations or anthropologies (e.g. "Gaslight and Poe's Symbolist Esthetic" or "The Swastika as Electric Icon," the latter an exercise in demonology). George and his horse were not afraid of demons, or Dragons, perhaps because he knew, better than most of us, that the Devils too believe, and it scares the Hell out of them. I remember once asking a Catholic Monsignor if he hoped the current summer's Holy Water was free of bacterial contaminants, a question to which he replied with a smile that he didn't see how it couldn't be "because we boil the Hell out of it." Of course, George was too cool a customer for that approach. George cooled it, and many of us still feel his quiet presence ... including that Dragon shivering over there.