Paper cranes
I like to do something with my hands when I'm talking on the phone or when I'm in the midst of a long, face-to-face conversation. In high school, I would doodle on the backs of envelopes and worksheets while I chatted for hours with my girlfriends. Just the other day, my husband was flipping through the latest issue of a magazine we subscribe to and asked if I'd been on the phone with a specific friend a few days ago - he could tell from my drawings what I'd been talking about, and with whom. At restaurants, I will fold and refold the corners of my cloth napkin. If there's an old receipt on the table when I'm talking to someone at a cafe, I will, without thinking, fold it into a paper crane.
My dad has always had a sweet tooth and a few years ago, he discovered a brand of 92% dark chocolate he claims his doctor decreed acceptable for diabetics. He keeps at least three boxes of these dark chocolates on hand. One day when I was over, he shared some with me (I inherited his appetite for sweets) and after eating a couple, I reflexively started folding cranes with the wrappers - the paper is copper-colored, so that the resulting birds had a beautiful metallic sheen. The next time I went over, I noticed that he started keeping the wrappers from all the chocolates he had eaten since my last visit. He had pressed them flat and stacked them neatly in the original tin. Now, whenever I'm at my parents', I help myself to the stacks of chocolate wrappers and fold the cranes as we talk at their dining table. Dad likes to set lofty goals and he announced that I would fold 1000 paper cranes for him. To date, I've folded about 600. Never mind that that also means he's eaten that many chocolates, it's for his good fortune.
Yesterday, a Sunday, I visited my parents for lunch. After a string of cold, wet weather, the spring sun finally made its appearance and we took the opportunity to stroll through their neighborhood market before stopping for noodles. We went back home for fruits and dessert and this time, when I started folding cranes, Dad reached for a wrapper and asked me to teach him. If you know my dad - an ex-rugby player with a "husky" (years ago, when a doctor described him as borderline obese, Dad reframed the description) build, who sports a ponytail, a full beard and an impatient nature - then you know how surprised I was that he wanted to spend the afternoon folding origami with his daughter. I thought he would stop after one try, but he kept reaching for more wrappers. It was clear his stubby fingers did not have the fine motor skills origami required, but he was focused on the task at hand. The task, I realized, was not so much making paper birds, but meditating on well wishes.
Meanwhile, Mom was drinking tea and shelling pistachios across the table. She asked if my family had been eating her blessed eggs. My mother consistently - and adamantly - sends me home with bags of produce; two weeks ago, we noticed that the eggs she was gifting us were all drawn with a quick dash of a permanent marker. Apparently, she had been bringing cartons of eggs to her neighborhood temple - the same one we visit together on the first day of the Lunar New Year - and praying for good fortune, blessing the eggs we eat, marking each one she infuses with her good wishes. I told her that not only have we been eating her blessed eggs, they were working!
To which Dad - eyes still focused on his paper crane - snorted.
But that didn't dampen Mom's spirits, whose face lit up, knowing that her good intentions were being received and eaten with relish. I watched my dad work on his paper cranes, the chocolate wrapper impossibly tiny in his thick hands, and thought about how well wishes are as much a meditation for the person gifting the blessing as they are for the one receiving it.
