Portland, Oregon

Raindrops slide down the windows of the kiosk. Yesterday I thought I was on a different corner, something was peculiar. Then I realized the kiosk was gone, leaving hexagonal heads of the bolts that had held it to the street still screwed in. What was no longer standing opened me to the rain.

After expounding on the virtues of cultures that hunted and gathered their food, as opposed to buying it in the "natural foods" store where he worked, the young man told me that Multnomah, the county in which we live, "means something like 'lung disease.'" "The Indians weren't here all year round," he went on. "They only came to pick berries." "Why didn't they live here?" I asked. "The damp air."

Now the kiosk has returned, seemingly solid. But I know if we enlarge a single fold of cerebellum, or a folium, we can begin to see the organization of cell types. The outermost layer of the cortex is called the molecular layer, and is nearly cell-free. Instead everything had to come from sensations, experienced in nature and rendered immediately, thus without relying on memory....For that matter it is occupied mostly by axons and dendrites. The layer below that is a monolayer of large cells called Purkinje cells, central players in the circuitry of the cerebellum. Below the Purkinje cells it's a virtual structure, symbolically held together by the mind's moment-to-moment reconstruction of itself, bolts and all.