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I don’t want to make people worry and it seems on the face of it wrong to conceive of a mushroom as having intent, but it makes basic good sense to be careful about being too sure what a thousand-mile-long, three-billion-ton, contiguous, ten-thousand-year-old organism that eats forests and can cross mountains and rivers is and isn’t up to.

Mushrooms have six genders, one that is sort of male, two that are sort of female, and three that are something else.

Straight-out without a lot of qualifiers, I should admit that I am not a careful person. The fact that I have managed to achieve certain things doesn’t matter. That I am aware of my uncarefulness isn’t as helpful as you might think. My parents were told by the principal of West Barnstable Elementary School and my teacher that I was a bright boy whose spelling was in the retarded range and whose handwriting was the worst they’d ever seen. I find it embarrassing that I spell so badly. I will do almost anything to avoid being embarrassed, but no effort either on my part or on the part of any teacher has ever dented my utter bafflement when it comes to choosing which letters to put down, how many, and in what order.

Somewhere in high school I came across Mark Twain’s statement that it shouldn’t be held against someone if they know more than one way to spell a word. Years later, at a conference on ADHD, a colleague said that Huck Finn had ADHD and would be treated today and have a better life. I said that the best that treatment could achieve would be to make him into a second-rate Becky Thatcher, and we should worry, at least a little, about that.

I had actually hoped that wild mushrooms might be helpful with my uncarefulness, that the stakes involved might have an alerting focusing effect.

First you have to be scanning for mushrooms as you walk along. If you’re not looking for anything, maybe you won’t see anything. If you look for mushrooms, maybe you’ll see other things, but at least you’re looking—I think that’s what I thought—and then you find something mushroom-like. And here’s where I thought the carefulness would come in: I would be picking and maybe eating something that would either taste incredibly good or would poison me.

I was so pleased with myself when I found what I thought were sweetbread mushrooms because they weren’t all chewed up by insects the way so many of the edibles were and because there were so many of them, which meant maybe I’d be able to make wild mushrooms for a big group.

When I was gnawing on this nondescript piece of crap that was supposed to be bread-like and delicate, it didn’t occur to me that I could have been wrong about the identity of the mushroom. I was going to write the authors in question to tell them that the sweetbread mushroom had an indifferent taste and a disagreeable rubbery texture.

Fifteen minutes or so after eating the new mushroom, which I did not serve to my wife, thank God, my heart started racing, painful muscle spasms seized the back of my throat, and sweat started pouring off me. I remembered seeing a picture of a mushroom, one of the ones with a skull and crossbones under it, that was called the sweating mushroom. Funny name, I had thought.

“I think I might have made a mistake with the mushrooms,” I said softly.

“What’s that, dear?”

“I think I made a mistake with the mushrooms,” I said too loudly, an octave above where I usually speak. Had I been sure I had ingested a less-than-fatal dose, I would have just gone quietly to bed, turned out the lights, and hoped for the best.

It didn’t help that I was on the staff of the hospital where I went to get my stomach pumped. Had I been thinking more clearly, I would have gone elsewhere and maybe used another name.

“Doctor … what are you doing here?”

“I was hoping maybe you could start an IV, run some saline, and pump out my stomach.”

“Why are you dripping sweat?”

“Funny you should notice that.”

There are six ways mushrooms can be toxic. One or two would have been plenty. The less toxic ones make