In an earlier version of this page (still accessible on the Web if you know where to look), I told a story of walking in the Annex in Toronto in 1986, walking past two young women singing an obscure punk song.

The memory is vivid, yet I cannot be sure that it was not almost entirely invented. I believed that I heard them singing that song, then only eight years old, but I had changed completely in those eight years, so it seemed much older. They were younger; they would have been in middle school when the song and the album of the same name were released on another continent. I didn't stop to think about it at the time or remark on it, though in that instant I thought it delightful.

The little details -- the guitar case with no guitar, their holding hands mirroring the entwined fingers of my wife-to-be and me, their turning slightly away from each other and looking slightly upward as they sang in unison -- or was it harmony? -- seem entirely pasted-on, some pastiche of old romantic musical clichés and dream fragments. My dreams are not very visually vivid; they consist of concepts and ideas, and I frequently, in them, have difficulty seeing. This could very well be a concept.

And, yet, does it matter? I remember it. Something like it happened, once.