“Origami Exhibition,” the Ann Arbor Observer listing for last Saturday said. “Public showcase of contemporary paper art, featuring nearly 50 of the world’s leading origami designers.” That sounded worth braving the rain, and it was. Regrettably, the exhibition was in the same room at the same time as after-lunch speakers, so the space was dimly lit, with what light there was focused on the speakers in the center of the room, rather than on the exhibition around the periphery.
What you could see of the exhibited work was, however, eye-opening. No basic cranes here. No basic anything. Origami stegosaurus? Check. Dragons? Many and detailed. Human faces and figures? With expression. Paper art objects. In their plenty.
My favorite item was a whale, gradated in color and subtly curved. It looked as if it had weight and substance, like a stone carving that would be cool to the touch. The folds of paper of which it was shaped were so fine, so crisp, so perfect. And the room was so dark, I don’t even know the artist’s name.
That afternoon, Daughter Number Four and I opened the box of a new jigsaw puzzle and were delighted by another paper innovation: the pieces of the puzzle had letters on the back. And the letters tied in to a grid of sections of the puzzle. Huzzah! Instead of just sorting out edge pieces while we waited for Daughter Number Two to arrive, we pulled edge pieces, then immediately made piles by letter. All the A pieces over here, all the F pieces over there.
D#4 informed me that pieces bearing more than one letter—that is, that were on the borders of gridded sections—would be sorted with the section on the left, or on the top, depending on the arrangement of the letters. The puzzle maker even went so far as to put a line on the back of grid-border pieces, so you could go to the D pile, for instance, select all the line-backed pieces, and put together a line of interior pieces without even turning them over to the image side.
The letters also indicated the correct orientation of pieces. It was a cinch to tell which way was up, which was a great help, given the intricacy of the image. Sometimes we worked with the pieces image-side-up, and sometimes flipped them over. The puzzle maker is Idea Bazar [stet], and we all enjoyed the grid.
On Sunday, my sweetheart and I went to the Dexter Community Band’s summertime concert. The band presented a program of patriotic and historic pieces, with a nice mix of the familiar and the less-familiar. One was William Schuman’s treatment of William Billings’ anthem, Chester. Billings’ piece was popular during the Revolutionary War, and appeared in a piano book of patriotic songs I had as a kid.
The lyrics begin, “Let tyrants shake their iron rod.” They say nothing about any Chester, nor did the narrator at the concert, although he read verses I hadn’t known. So I Googled it today. Composers were neither obliged nor expected to justify the names they gave their music. The names just made the music easy to refer to. Sort of like naming children.
My honey and I were stopped at one of the longer lights in town yesterday afternoon, when a box truck drove past us from behind and to our left and crashed into the car ahead of us in our lane. Such a noise! Such a shaking of the car in front of us! Fortunately, the car was a Volvo, and the driver was wearing his seat belt.
The Volvo was a few inches further to the left than we were, but well within the lane, when the truck made contact. It peeled back the Volvo’s rear quarter panel and pushed in pretty much all of the rest of that side of the car. The truck driver misjudged the size of his own vehicle.
The incident was disturbing enough that the two of us were still talking about it over dinner, and here’s what I was left wondering. After an accident, folks are ill at ease—to say the least—when they find themselves in similar situations afterward. The Volvo driver was sitting at a traffic light minding his own business when a truck hit him from another lane. Do you suppose that that man is now doomed to anxiety at every red light? In perpetuity?
Maybe he should make a list of nonstressful subjects to think about in those situations. Like what he’d most like to see realized in origami. Or good names for children.
22 May 2026