How can you not love a city where you can do the following? Down the hill from home beneath a weak sun and through pusillanimous snow, tossed around like confetti at a desultory wedding, to an ugly shopping center. You know the type: cheap concrete bricks bespattered by beautiful graffiti, and down ill-formed stairs of dirty tile to a library of grubby-fingered books. Hence to a back room called, grandly, Meeting Room 191.

After setting out old metal & plastic chairs & tables, we settled down with a pile of colored paper in front of us. A fat lady (and most Canadians are not fat, so she sort of sticks out) announces that for the next hour we will have an origami lesson.

I was here because I has surfed the web and came across Joseph Wu’s site on Origami. He is billed on the site as a “master”. To back up this claim there are pictures of intricate and beautiful paper pieces. He also announces that every fourth Saturday, the Vancouver Origami Society meets in the Oakland Shopping Center. So here I was seated beside a 70-year old lady with a pile of paper cut from magazines—she told me she could not afford origami paper, which like everything here is very expensive—about three times the cost in the USA.

The lesson started with the making of a hedgehog. Simple but cute. Mine is of orange paper with a white snout and a nicely rounded body. Took a long time to make as most of the students were not too skilled. The students included: a father and daughter (he says he is the one who is hooked, she likes it too); a mother and five-year old son who chatted incessantly but was amazingly good at folding; an old Chinese man with a quiet and inscrutable attitude; a good-looking young man who seemed to have just come from a soccer game; a forty year-old fellow who had left his Harley Davidson outside; a mining engineer just back from Peru; a group of five Chinese girls who would have been more at home flirting with young boys; a very fat man who focused intensely on his paper; and others to make a total of twenty five of us.

Having made the hedgehog, I wondered what next. Joseph Wu himself stood up. He is thirty-five, the father of two young kids (as I found out chatting to him), looks like a computer technician, and has a great sense of humor. And he has his own website on origami.  He led us through the folding of a paper elephant that now sits in front of me. I chose a piece of yellow paper. My elephant is deceptively simple: His trunk rises in pride and his tail swings in defiance. His limbs are bulky and bold and his ears flair in pride. I have made every elephant I can find in my hundred or so origami books, but this one is unique. It is not me that made this one special—that much I know—I believe it is the guidance of a master. How extraordinary!

After the lesson, we sat around free to fold whatever we liked. The father, his daughter, the old lady, and I at the same table decide to explore peacocks. The father who looks like a construction worker said he would show us his latest pattern for a peacock. Now I have made a series of peacocks in the past. I have used patterns from numerous books and made up my own designs. They were all fun, but clunky at best. This peacock is elegant, light, free, and happy.

Next I tried a witch on a broomstick. I succeeded. The origami style that characterizes her is that of a warrior on a horse that I made from a pattern dating from 1815 Germany. I bought the book with the pattern in Hawaii. Not all origami is Japanese; there are superb examples from nineteenth century Spain and Germany, and my warrior & witch are good examples of the old European tradition.

As a parting gift, I gave the old lady my $10 packet of origami paper and she gave me a pleated circle of coupons from a local restaurant.

I will go back. It is wonderful to find others who share a crazy obsession. It is nice to be with others who care about a reverse fold, a mountain versus valley fold, a crimp, the weight of paper, and the texture of a final ephemeral product. We have nothing in common except a crazy focus on paper and folds and pieces that are good for nothing. At best this is the happiness that comes from intense concentration and involvement in something you are good at doing.

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