My family likes to play a sometimes-entertaining game called Brushes with Greatness. We all have our favorites. My older sister rode the Bull at Gilley's, which is great, apparently, if you live in Texas. My brother shook hands with Rear Admiral _____ aboard the USS _____ during Iraq War I. (Personally, my interest tends to wane with sailors who are fully dressed, admirals notwithstanding, rear or otherwise.) My mother once gave Alfred Hitchcock directions to Santa Cruz Wharf. And my youngest sister performed a mammography on our then-governor's boobs. (My Mormon grandmother took a more-than-healthy interest in the details, which explained a lot of unanswered questions.)

Until I went into books, my favorite great brush was with Richard Nixon when I was twelve. The upshot of this brush was that despite severe disapproval from my fifth grade teacher Mrs. Johnson (her husband was the local Republican Party cadre) and proximity to Nixon, I never got to shake the great man's hand because my friends and I had laden ourselves with all the Republican booty we could scarf from the catered buffet, and I hadn't a free limb to spare.

In the literary world I have been glad to brush greatness on more occasions than I can now count. I have been hustled from a restroom at the Hollywood Athletic Club where Salman Rushdie had taken up residence in the handicapped stall; been glared down by Martin Amis while challenging his smoldering cigarette in a no-smoking room (nay, no-smoking building!); dined and gotten wickedly plastered with Chuck Palahniuk; bantered about American naiveté with Margaret Atwood on the eve of the presidential appointment 2000; and enjoyed a long conversation on the art of writing with Kent Haruf.

Amongst them all, however, I believe my single most magical literary moment was with Alistair MacLeod and his novel No Great Mischief, a work which gave me one of the most extraordinary reading experiences of my life. This is prose so well written, each sentence reads like a small poem. There is not an ounce of fat in the whole work. If you removed any single word, the structure would collapse. It is humorous, wise, witty, erudite, never overwrought, warm, and humane. MacLeod took twenty years to complete No Great Mischief and after reading it, one might wish that all novelists took twenty years to complete their novels. Ultimately, the publishing world and its readers would benefit from some sacrifice of quantity for the sake of quality.

Alistair appeared at BookExpo that year to promote No Great Mischief. I was unable to attend his luncheon, but his publicist said she would, nevertheless, introduce me. Reveling in the thought of another brush with greatness, I followed the publicist through a hall filled with tables of satisfied booksellers already eating and chattering with their favorite writers. We finally arrived at Alistair's table. She tapped him and he glanced upward, not completely happy to be interrupted. He stood. I babbled incoherencies about reading his novel being the greatest moment of my life and how happy I was to meet the greatest writer in the English language and how I cherished and adored No Great Mischief and how it was the best book of the late 20th century, and on and on, and who knows what I really said. Alistair, a true gentleman with a sense of manners one rarely sees now-a-days, patted my hand, watched me with gentle eyes, and replied he was gratified I appreciated his book. Relief! Success! I didn't feel a total fool. I reminded Alistair that he would speak at Powell's in three weeks and that I would see him there. "I'll remember you, young man," he said, wagging his finger, and digging into his institutional salad. "I'll remember you. Don't worry... I'll remember you," he said, spearing an unripe tomato.

Three weeks later, we were all notified of Alistair's arrival for his reading of No Great Mischief. I walked through the Pearl Room doors, confident in my first-name relationship with the great man, approached him and shook his hand. "Good evening, Mr. MacLeod. Welcome to Powell's. I don't know if you remember. We met in Chicago." He watched me with those gentle, yet hawkish, eyes that do not miss anything that passes before them, got a devilish grin on his face and replied, "Yes, of course I remember." His grin grew to a smile. He tightened his grip on my sweaty palm. "When we were both very young." And he patted my hand.