Once upon a time there was a little boy who promised his pen pal that he'd mail her rocks from where he lived.  Every day, he dutifully taped an address label and postage to a stone the size of his fist, and put it in the mailbox.

The postman never collected them.  After several months went by, the postman was joking with other letter carriers about the dumbest things they'd seen go through the mail, and the postman mentioned the rocks just as his supervisor was walking by.

"Do these rocks have addresses?" asked the supervisor.

"Yes," answered the postman, surprised.

"Do they have adequate postage?" asked the supervisor.

"Well, yes," the sheepish postman responded.

"Then it's your duty to deliver them," said the supervisor.  "See that it gets done."

The next day, the postman found himself confronted by the pile of fifty or sixty half-pound rocks, and he sorely wished that he hadn't let the job pile up.


I have a pile of rocks.  I've been trying to mail them away for years, but somehow, none of my rocks seem to have adequate postage.  My rocks are all the ways in which I wasn't like other boys, I wasn't like other girls, I wasn't like other people, I wasn't like humans, I wasn't like wolves -- I wasn't like anything I ever wanted or struggled to be.

And every so often, I add another stamp to one of those rocks.

Somehow it always comes back "insufficient postage."