From: THE KUBRA BIRD

TEXT 269
copyright©2007 Allen Sutterfield

8:5A a.m. Oct. 18:

6 hours sleep but somehow I'm perky and peppy and more resolved than in a long while. Immediately went out front to "read the weather" and turn off the lights, beautiful sunny crisp morning awaited! Splashes of gold and orange as the sun lit up the trees across the street. Clear sky and cool clarity everywhere. The weather is always a surprise emerging from this basement. Dreams of Mullah Nasser Eddin prepared my resolve, I guess! I can't recall particulars but I seemed almost to be a current representative of that esteemed hodja.

One story I was either writing living dreaming telling or listening to was called "The Man Who Needed Stamps" or, "Hidden Resources." The Mulla was getting no mail because he had no moolah for stamps for letters he wanted to write to his many friends. He decided to "concentrate in public", i.e., protest and meditate at the same time, by taking up a position on the steps of City Hall. After a couple of hours a policeman approached, asking to see his permit to sit there. Naturally the Mulla had no such thing, and was surprised to find such a requirement, being a well­known citizen of the place. "Well you at least have to have your birth certificate, bring me that and I will accept it as a temporary permit you do have a birth certificate, don't you?" "Of course I do!" he shouted and rushed home to obtain the document.

The Mulla kept all his papers, both trivial and important, in a huge trunk in a small room next to his bedroom. Before locating the birth certificate, however, he carne across all the letters he had received in the past, he kept everything of that nature, and he began to look at all the different handwritings and names of correspondents, some of whom he'd all but forgotten. Then he noticed the stamps, still intact, because he always opened the envelopes carefully and neatly. Many of the stamps had not been cancelled by those sleepers working in the post office! He immediately chose all the envelopes with uncancelled stamps, went into the kitchen and put the kettle on, made a pot of tea and simultaneously steamed free all the stamps.

While drinking the tea in the small garden out back, sitting at a wooden table where he had often written and read letters, he at once wrote to a dozen of his friends, assuring them that whatever it was that they might think they needed on any given morning, that thing they probably already had, if only they knew where to look for it. True, it often required another person to occasion their looking, but that person was sure to appear, if only they concentrated on the actual problem at hand.