ABSTRACT
One day I was browsing in my favorite used book store when high up, on the topmost shelf, I spied a book by John Farley entitled Gametes and Spores . I was interested in mushrooms in those days since Poon Hill had such a wild abundance: red, orange, yellow, blue, purple, brown, and white ones, all waiting, in those years before the drought, to be identifi ed. The gametes of the title were unfamiliar-they turned out to be sex cells-but I knew about spores; I had started to make spore prints from my mushrooms with a view toward eating the ones that passed the safety tests, as soon as I got up the courage.
