The second incident is this:  Laurie once had a favourite story - about a princess who lived in a castle.  She used to have me, Brent and Wendy act the story out with her in the forest out back.  It went like this - a princess who lived in a castle tower fell in love with a traveling prince from a far off land.  Her fathe the king was furious.  He contacted a witch, who made up a forgetting potion for him.  The King then went up to his daughter's room in the tower and forced her to drink the witch's potion.  He had his guards hold his daughter's arms behind her back while he poured the vile brew down her throat.  Once the potion was inside her, the guards let go of her.  But the suddenly, before they could stop her, the Princess ran to the window and jumped from the tower to her death, before the potion could take hold of her soul, before she could forget her love.

The last incident is this: Growing up, me, Brent and Laurie would raise Canada geese.  Laurie would steal eggs from nests next to the ponds at the golf coursel we would incubate the eggs in a tinfoil-lined Johnny Walker whyskey box heated with a 40-watt bulb, turning the eggs over twice each day until they hatched - an event filled with delightful peeping sounds which would continue for the next few blissful months as the peeping graduated into honking.

Geese make wonderful pets - curious, affectionate, loyal and smart as whips.  And such fun, too.  They would sit beside us on the lawn, picking at the grass while we would read trashy paperbacks and stroke the gentle grey fluff on their chests.  Every so often they would crane in with their increasingly longer necks to nibble on our ears and give adolescent honking sounds in their insatiable quests for more attention.  They were summer friends, waddling behind us around the neighbourhood, honking like klaxon horns, hissing at cats and scampering to our sides should we stop for even a moment.  During storms they would sit inside perched on the piano stool, afterward scampering back out to the yard and the pond, leaving a trail of lawn-clipping poop in their wake.  So much work, but so much fun.

Anyhow, the thing about Canada geese is that they can only remember you for a year and one day.  This is to say that inevitably, no matte how cosmopolitan their upbringing, all geese return to the wild and they forget the family they grew up with; it is a sad truth that colours one's experience with them.  But as I have said, they do remember for a year and a day - there is one day of the year when they come home, just one time.

Usually it is very early in the morning while you are still deep asleep.  You are awakened by a familiar sound, the sound of honking, and so you rush out into the yard with the rest of your family, all of you blear-eyed.  You check the pond and the lawn and find no sign of your old friends.  And then you look up onto the roof - up to the roof's crest.  There you see your old friends, standing on the summit, plump as Thanksgiving turkeys, rlaring the happy trumpets that lay rejoicing inside their hears - letting you know that for just this one time, as you stand there waving to them, that their love for you is greater than those forces in the universe thaat would split apart any of us - that would erase that best part of us - our memories of what once was.

Douglas Coupland
Life After God: Patty Hearst

*honk*