While volunteering at this year’s Vancouver International Writers Festival…

1. A glimpse of George Bowering as the washroom door across the hall from the green room swings briefly open: combing back his greying hair while watching his mirror image do the same. Snagging him as he dashes out, shirt-tails untucked beneath a Colorado Rockies jacket, an “Author” tag on a cord around his neck.

   “Would you mind signing one of your books for me?” — holding out A Magpie Life: Growing a Writer

   “Sure: no problem” He feels shirt pockets, pants, with palms in search of a pen; I offer mine.

   “I’ve been known to walk away these”

   “Thanks: I’ve now been warned”

   Quick: the signature scrawl upon the title page. And then he’s half gone, turning down the hall towards the hotel lounge, to catch another inning of World Series Game 5.

   “What’s the score?” I call after him.

   “6 to 3 the last I heard”

   “For who?”

   “San Francisco, fortunately”

   And he’s away, shirt-tails flapping, in search of a hotdog and a beer and an umpire’s call to scorn.

2. Stephen Osborne sitting Buddha-like in the centre of the green room, reviewing his notes before the evening event; a calm eye in the literary storm brewing.

   I had to tell him the coincidence of it: earlier that very evening leafing randomly through Walter Benjamin’s massive Arcades Project (a treasure: ordered and anticipated months ago, and finally arrived). And in the midst all that text, all those peeks into a long-past Paris, by chance I find the one small fragment which had served as seed for his Geist piece on waving.

   The shared delight on both our faces.

   “The text itself was waving at you” he laughs.