Mysterious Paper Crane

Submitted by Jan on Wed, 11/18/2009 - 12:23.

Mysterious Paper Crane

Wed, 11/18/2009 - 09:55 | rlp

I received a letter last summer. It arrived at the church, having been mailed from Corpus Christi on August 10th. There was no return address on the envelope. My name and address were carefully written with a calligraphy pen. There were faint guidelines, erased but still visible, which the person used to keep his or her handwriting straight.

“Whoever sent this was being very careful and deliberate about it,” I thought.

I opened the envelope and an origami crane fell out. A letter included with it told the story of Sadako Sasaki, a young girl from Hiroshima, who died ten years after the atomic bomb was dropped on her city. The radiation from that bomb caused the leukemia that killed her.

According to the story, while Sadako was sick she learned of an ancient Japanese legend. The crane was thought to live for a thousand years, and it was said that if a sick person folded a thousand cranes, she would be healed. Sadako tried very hard to fold a thousand cranes. She wrote the word “peace” on each one and hung them from the ceiling above her bed. She managed 644 before she succumbed to the disease. Her schoolmates folded the remaining 356 after she died, and they buried her with a thousand cranes.

It’s a sad story but strangely moving. Little Sadako folding cranes with such faith and hope. Her friends finishing the job for her. You can imagine her floating in a sea of paper cranes as the lid to her coffin closed. The whole thing reminds me a lot of prayers that I’ve heard and spoken myself over the years. Prayers offered with all the faith we can muster but not really changing things very much. At least not as far as we can tell.

Whoever sent me the letter and crane was moved by this story and decided to fold 1000 cranes, beginning on August 6th of this year. Each crane has the word “peace” written on it in Greek and is numbered. Mine is number 42 in the series. It looks like this person was making about 5 a day when mine was mailed to me. At that pace the job should be finished sometime in February. I assume many of them will be mailed around the world, each with an impossible dream of peace written on one of its wings.

I say impossible because we all know, don’t we, that there will be no lasting and universal peace in this world. Not in our time or any other. Folded cranes were no match for the leukemia that killed Sadako Sasaki. And the cranes this person in Corpus Christi is making are equally as powerless when it comes to bringing about peace in our world. While there will always be gentle people of the crane-folding type, there will also be others for whom violence is the quick and easy answer. That is the reality of the situation.

So here I sit in my office holding a paper crane. It’s not a particularly attractive crane. It was made from a recycled magazine page. According to the letter that came with it, all 1000 cranes will be made from discarded paper. One wing is sky blue and has a woman’s leg cutting across it. Another part is white and covered with mailing information that looks like it was generated with a mid-90s dot matrix printer. The neck has the words “Head-to-to for $100” written on it. One of the wings says “Simple tricks for beating boredom.”

It’s perfect. An impossible dream folded by a crazy idealist with paper from an American magazine and covered with marketing slogans. Its form is a perfect expression of its function.

I wonder what kind of paper Sadako used? Maybe she used real origami paper with its gorgeous, creamy colors. Or maybe her parents spent all their money on doctors, forcing her to use scraps, as my new friend in Corpus Christi is doing. I don’t suppose it matters. Either way, it must have been powerful to see her in her coffin, covered by a blanket of cranes with only her face and her hands showing. She took her dream of peace, both for her body and for the world, all the way to the grave.

And I’m sitting here in San Antonio, holding a homely little crane and feeling small and powerless. My prayers remind me a lot of the crane I’m holding in my hand. Homely, misshapen, wrapped in the trappings of my culture, and, frankly, I’m not sure what comes of them.

So I ask you. What is this crane worth? Where would you place it’s value among my possessions? What should I do with it? I’ll certainly give it a place of honor on my office shelves along with the other flotsam and jetsam that has accumulated over the years. If you ever come to my office, I’ll show it to you. That’s fine, but…

What should I do with it? What should I do to honor the hope of the one that folded it?

I swear this is right off the top of my head but, dammit, I’m folding twenty-five cranes. That’s right, twenty-five. And I’m going to mail them to the first twenty-five people who are brave enough to leave an address in the comments to this post. If I send you one, you have to promise to make a crane yourself - at least one - and mail it to someone else.

It’s absolutely ridiculous and I regret writing it already. What was I thinking? My new book is coming out, and I’ve got to mail a bunch of those to people in the next couple of weeks. I should go back right now and just delete the previous paragraph. I could think of some other way to end this piece. But I’m not going to do it. I’m going to fold the cranes. What the hell. Why not? I walk around the church property offering up crazy prayers all the time. Doing things that don't make sense is par for the course with Christianity, right? Why stop now?

Why am I doing this? I don’t know, exactly. Lots of reasons:

I’m doing it because something in me demands it. I’m doing it because I want to stand with the dreamers, and the pray-ers, and the crane folders. You know, the people who do crazy idealistic stuff without any promise that anything will come of it. It’s kind of silly, but I want to be one of those dreamy, crane-folding people. It’s goofy, I know. I’m an incurable romantic. I can’t tell you how often that has sustained my Christianity in seasons of doubt.

I will say this though: Some little girl folded a bunch of cranes 60 years ago. At the time it didn’t seem like much came from it. But here I am in San Antonio about to fold twenty-five cranes, write “peace” on them, and mail them to total strangers. That’s something, right?

What can we say about that? What will these twenty-five cranes be worth? What will they mean? How will they speak to those who receive them?

As with most things in life that matter, in the end we are left with unanswered questions.

rlp

My homely little magazine crane