Assumption (wisdom stories)
How dare you!
Janet was a middle aged woman who was on a business trip. After three days of tiring meetings, she went to the airport to get a flight home. When she arrived at the airport, she was irritated to discover that her flight was delayed by an hour.
To help pass the time, she went to the airport shop, bought a book, a coffee and a small packet of biscuits.
The airport was crowded and she found a seat in the lounge, next to a stranger – a young man in his twenties.
After a few minutes’ reading she became absorbed in her book.
She took a biscuit from the packet and began to drink her coffee. To her great surprise, the stranger in the next seat calmly took one of the biscuits and ate it.
Stunned, she couldn’t bring herself to say anything, nor even to look at the stranger. Nervously she continued reading. After a few minutes she slowly picked up and ate the third biscuit.
Incredibly, the stranger took the fourth biscuit and ate it, then to the woman’s amazement, he picked up the packet and offered her the last biscuit.
This being too much to tolerate, the lady angrily picked up her belongings, gave the stranger an angry scowl and marched off to the boarding gate, where her flight was now ready.
Flustered and enraged, she reached inside her bag for her boarding ticket, and found her biscuits.
The gift
A bus was driving along a quiet country road near a small town in the south of France. In one seat sat a wispy old man. He was holding a bunch of beautiful fresh flowers. Across the aisle sat a young girl. Her eyes kept looking again and again at the old man’s flowers.
The time came for the man to get off the bus. As he walked past the girl, he stopped and handed her the flowers. He said, “I can see you love the flowers and I think my wife would like for you to have them. I’ll tell her I gave them to you.”
The girl accepted the flowers and then watched the old man get off the bus and walk through the gates of a small cemetery.
Just good friends
As usual, I wake up early and I gaze at the man who is sleeping next to me. He has such a kind, loving face, even when he sleeps, and I feel deep affection for him. It will be some time before he wakes. I let my mind wander and I remember back to how we met.
We met at a pub called “The Cat and Whistle” which I visited often. I was first attracted to him, not because he was good looking, but because he seemed kind and gentle. Every night, he used to sit at the same table alone and drink his beer and watch people playing darts.
Then one night, a blonde woman came and sat at his table and started talking to him. From then on, each night, they sat together. To be honest, I felt very jealous. Then after 20 days, they had an argument and she went away. I felt extremely happy. The next night, I went straight over to his table and I sat beside him. I fluttered my eyelids and he smiled at me. There was no need to talk. We were just two lonely souls connecting. Spontaneously, he put his out his hand and caressed my cheek. Later that night, it just seemed natural to leave with him. And we have been living together ever since.
We have never spoken about our pasts. And that is a good thing because life was very hard for me before we met. I am one of four and our father deserted us when I was very young. I had two babies of my own, but they were taken away from me. It is a very painful memory.
My attention comes back to the man sleeping next to me. I cannot imagine life without him. Suddenly the alarm goes and he wakes up. I pretend to be asleep and through closed eyelids, I watch him get out of bed. As usual he puts his foot into the wrong slipper and he groans. Then he turns round to me and says “Wake up, lazy bones!” but as usual, I roll over and lie in the warm hollow that his body has left. “I suppose you want me to get you breakfast in bed again, do you!” he says.
He walks out the bedroom and I can hear his footstep as he goes to the kitchen. Then, I can hear the clinks and clanks of him making breakfast. It’s time to get up, I think. I leap out of bed and I go to join him in the kitchen. He is at the table, eating cornflakes from a bowl. “Nice of you to join me!” he says. He pushes my bowl over to me and I lap it up happily. It’s not true that we cats only swish our tails when angry.
Source: Adapted from a story by Jeffrey Archer
The Hare Dryer
Have I told you about the Angora rabbit in Manchester? No? Well, it’s an amazing story! A friend of mine told it to me. He said it was true! Anyway this couple in Manchester in England didn’t have any children so they bought an Angora rabbit – you know, the one with long fluffy white hair and little red eyes. They loved this rabbit. They kissed it and cuddled it and called it “sweetheart” and all that sort of thing. Anyway the couple next door had a small dog – you know, the sort that bites postmen on the ankle. And they said, “If our dog ever gets hold of that rabbit it’s going to be a very dead rabbit!”
Anyway, one day they came downstairs and saw their dog in the garden going, “Grrrr! Grrrr!” So they went into the garden and found it had got a very dead rabbit in its mouth. The neighbours weren’t at home and the car wasn’t in the driveway so the couple with the dog took the rabbit inside the house and put it on the kitchen table. “They are going to be so upset if they know our dog killed their rabbit! What are we going to do?”
They looked at the rabbit and saw that it was very dirty but otherwise looked fine. That’s when they had a clever idea.
“Why don’t we clean it and put it back in the cage? Then maybe they’ll think the rabbit died of a heart attack or something. They won’t know it was our dog that killed it.”
So they took the dirty rabbit to the bathroom and they washed its fur with shampoo and warm water. Then they dried its wet fur carefully with a hair dryer so the fur became nice and white and fluffy again. Finally, they raced outside and put the sweet smelling, dead rabbit back into its hutch and then went back home.
A little while later the couple came home. They drove their car up the driveway, then stopped, got out and walked across the garden crying. Suddenly they stopped and began to scream and hold each other! The couple with the dog ran out and said over the garden fence, “Is everything all right?”
“No!” they replied, “It’s the rabbit!”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s back in its cage!”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Well, it died yesterday and we buried it!”
The smuggler
Nasrudin used to take his donkey across a frontier every day, with the panniers loaded with straw. Since he admitted to being a smuggler when he trudged home every night, the frontier guards searched him again and again. They searched his person, sifted the straw, steeped it in water, even burned it from time to time. Meanwhile he was becoming visibly more and more prosperous. Then he retired and went to live in another country. Here one of the customs offices met him, years later. “You can tell me now, Nasrudin,” he said.“Whatever was it that you were smuggling, when we could never catch you out?”
“Donkeys,” said Nasrudin.
Source: Idries Shah