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The week before his heart operation I met George in Sobeys parking lot. He'd been advising the manager of the inappropriateness of the messages coming from the public address system and suggesting ways to improve them. We spent 15 minutes studying the great variety of costumes the coming-and-going customers had donned for their trip to the grocery store. That was George: the unexamined voyage to Sobeys was not worth making.

I met George in R.J. MacSween's creative writing seminar in 1958 where he was the leader of our small group as the editor of X-Writes, the literary magazine that became the prototype for The Antigonish Review, founded in 1970 by MacSween, George Sanderson, Gertrude Sanderson, and Patrick Walsh.

George and I met again in 1965. By then he and Gert, Pat and myself were all at St. F.X., George teaching Philosophy, Gert, Modern Languages and Pat and I, English. Dawn and I took George's seminar in Contemporary Philosophy in the sixties when universities were boiling cauldrons of activism: Viet Nam, etc., had students waving their guns against all forms of authority. The tumultuous times suited George completely because he never, from his experience and learning, lectured or explained the world to his students; he simply corralled them into an intellectual box and the only way out was to think. You could be right, you could be wrong, but it was think or sink.

George and Gert took over the Review as editor and general manager in the spring of 1981 and with astonishing success continued and expanded the MacSween mandate of encouraging new writers and visual artists from everywhere and particularly from Atlantic Canada. TAR office has a drawer full of letters of appreciation and now the book review sections of magazines and newspapers publish reviews of books written by writers who got their start in TAR.

During the wake period while we prepared for George's funeral we sat and chatted in the Sanderson living room. One wall was covered end to end with shelves full of books. Every flat surface bore stacks of books and magazines, several of them open or book-marked indicating George's progress: novels, poetry, anthropology, philosophy, astronomy, linguistics. In the basement two more rooms, an office and a bedroom were lined with bulging bookshelves. Outside a baby barn housed several dozen boxes of books George couldn't find room for in the house. Before his death he was looking for a charitable destination for his warehouse of books so he could make room for more. To say George was an avid, widely read reader would be the understatement of the millennium.

Picture George walking up Main Street in Antigonish. Our town does not have a lot of panhandlers but this day George comes upon one with his destitute hand hanging over the sidewalk. The average one of us would likely avert our eyes or reach into the pants pocket for a quarter or a looney. George without missing a step reaches for his wallet and pulls out whatever comes to his fingers, a twenty, and hands it over with a friendly greeting. He continues his journey to the credit union hoping to renew his mortgage because his hunger for books and magazines has overcome his line of credit: a modest example of George's enormous generosity.

George was a teacher, an editor, a cartoonist, a poet, an essayist, a film-script writer, a scholar, but mostly a philosopher, a thinker, and a humourist. I never heard George tell a joke, but he was the wittiest person I ever knew. All of his jokes were contextual and pretty well unrepeatable outside their context. He was a supreme punster; he never left a tern unstoned, a characteristic pointing to his appreciation of the absurd in language and in life. But the absurd in life never fooled George into thinking that life itself is absurd. He understood by instinct, supported by his study of Bergson and McLuhan, that the absurd, the bizarre, and the incongruous were merely the distorted masks of reality

Before his operation George sent me off to bring him back The New Scientist, The Economist, and The New York Review of Books, along with six bottles of water. At Sobeys I found a bin full of 500 ml bottles that looked like water to me and I brought them back and presented them to George along with the three magazines. Turns out they were six bottles of vinegar. It was our final absurdity together, our last laugh.

George haunts me every day, he joins my mother and father in a haunting choir, for which I am grateful because I don't want to forget him. He continues to make me laugh and to remind me that reality shines behind the masks. Good friends are like close relatives, we know we love them but we never know how much until they are gone.