A stranger folded a girl a paper crane while she waited for her grandfather, and she kept it for ten years. In Gateshead, a book group's walk in the woods brought a man outside again.
A Japanese teenager unfolds the origami crane a stranger gave her as a child and finds a message written inside, and in Gateshead an outdoor reading group helps a man who had been shut indoors for 18 months.
When Rika Matsuda was seven, she got a new bike, and it was faster than the one before it. 1 She took it to the park. When she tried the brakes, nothing happened, and she ran into the wall. Her foot began to hurt and turned purple, and she had to sit down. 1
A man walked over. Matsuda, looking back ten years later, remembers him as large and muscular, in a suit, in his twenties. She was seven, and he was a stranger, so she watched him. 1
"But when he said, 'Are you OK?' I knew from his kind and gentle voice that he was a very nice man," she said. 1
The man took her to a water fountain and helped her wash the cut. He passed her his phone so she could call her grandfather. While they waited, he took a piece of paper out of his bag and showed her how to fold an origami crane. 1
"He was really good at folding origami, and he taught me the right way to make a clean and beautiful crane," Matsuda said. "Maybe he wanted me to think about the paper instead of my foot." 1
Her grandfather arrived, and the man helped get her and the bike home. As they parted he said nothing. He smiled, handed her the crane and walked off. 1
She put the crane in her desk. Now and then she would see it and think of him. 2
Ten years later Matsuda was 17 and sitting in an English class. Her teacher, Benjamin Johnson, brought in My Unsung Hero, an NPR series in which people describe a stranger who once helped them. He asked the class to write about someone of their own. 1
She thought about the bike, and the man, and then about something she had never checked. Perhaps, while she had been on the phone to her grandfather, he had written on the paper. 1
She hurried home from school and unfolded the crane. He had.
Inside were four characters, a well-known Japanese expression. Translated roughly, they ask the reader to treasure every time two people cross paths, because it may never happen again. Cherish the moment, in short. 1
"Then I realized even more how kind and how nice of a man he was," Matsuda said. "And I thought, he's really my unsung hero." 1
Ten years on, the man who folded it is still a stranger. 2
The walk in the woods
In Gateshead, in the north of England, Ian Kirby went 18 months without leaving his house, apart from his mother's funeral. 3 An intruder had attacked him at home in October 2019, and afterwards he could not face going out. He and his mother had shielded together through the pandemic, and she died in September 2020. 3
He had taken early retirement in 2016 to look after her. After her death he described being in "a very dark place," and the house held him for another year. 3
In August 2021 he made himself leave. Reading Ramblers, a group run by Gateshead Libraries, walks a route through Chopwell Woods with a ranger from Forestry England. Members listen to an audiobook or trade stories as they go. 3
"Even on the day, I had hundreds of reasons I wasn't going to go," Kirby said. "It was the most scared I'd been for a long time, but I didn't want to let anyone down." 3
At that first session he picked Carrying David, the autobiography of the boxer Glenn McCrory. 3 McCrory wrote it around the life of his brother David, who had disabilities, and dedicated it to him as "the wind beneath my wings." That was the phrase Kirby's own mother had used for him. 3
"I read the whole of the book without stopping and it touched me deeply," he said. "The book changed my life." 3
Three years on, Kirby has joined a second book club and started volunteering at a care home. 3 The walks with other readers gave him "a new lease of life," he says, and books have become his friends. 3
He is due to appear on The Book That Changed My Life, a BBC Two programme in which Queen Camilla explores what reading can do for people. 3
Karen Leggott, of Gateshead Libraries' Reading for Wellbeing team, called his story "incredibly powerful." "The right book at the right time for the right person can be massively influential," she said. 3
Reading Ramblers meets in Chopwell Woods and is open to new members through Gateshead Libraries. 4
Reading both back, I'm struck by how small the objects are that carry everything. A sheet of paper folded beside a water fountain. A paperback chosen on a first walk in the woods.
References
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- 4Reading Ramblers
gateshead.gov.uk
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