I have a picture in my head of a sunny afternoon. Our backyard, living in the suburbs of Ottawa, had grass and a fence whose spans were raised just a few inches from the ground. The neighbor kid seemed so old. He had a job or something and worked somewhere that gave him access to bottle caps, the flat metal with the crinkled edges ones, the kind they used to use on pop bottles and now are the exclusive domain of beer. He would pass them to me under the fence, my little hand reaching through the space to accept the trivial treasure, and I saved them.

I don’t know how memory works, exactly, but that is one that seems to be filed right at very back end of the archives. The first one, one could call it. Simple. Silly. Whatever.