One damn thing leads to another. I forget to open the garage door this morning, back my car into the door, and splinter it. The actions we perform cause other events – my backing up causes the splintering. But events of other kinds – nonactions – have their effects, too. With no help from me, last night's storm caused a branch to fall from a tree, putting a hole in my roof.

Much as we might like to forget them, we often keep track of events like these and the causes that unite them. Although we might not have predicted these events, we can remember and reconstruct part of the causal sequences after they occur. In retelling the events of last summer, for example, we tend to relate the events in forward causal order, starting, say, at the beginning of our trip to Virginia in May and proceeding chronologically. If we want to mention other kinds of events from the same period, such as our summer work experiences, we may start again at the beginning of the summer, moving along the events in a parallel causal stream (Barsalou 1988). We also remember fictional stories in terms of the causal changes that compose their main plot line, remembering less about events falling on deadend side plots (Trabasso and Sperry 1985). We sometimes attribute causal powers to concrete objects as well as to events, but we can understand this sort of talk as an abbreviation for event causation.