scope question

[Choco]

I am re-working a program to abstract some elements of a set of cgi's into 
a shared library.  One thing I'm looking to abstract is the database 
connection code.  To do so, I've created a connect() method and a close() 
method.  The connect() method returns a cursor which the cgi then uses to 
execute a series of sql statements.  To close out the cursor and the 
database connection the cursor is passed to the close method.  How do I get 
this to work?  I find that I cannot simply do this:

def close(cursor):
        cursor.close()
        db.close()

This fails with a NameError: global name 'db' is not defined.

I'm searching for the solution to this at the moment, but thought I'd post 
here to see if anyone had any tips.

Thanks!

Glenn