Folded Beauty

Here’s what happens. 

I’m wearing impractical but fantastic heels, navigating cobblestone streets in a foreign country whose language I only grasp if I’m two beers into a poker game. 

Six blocks ago, I missed the bus that was supposed to take me to Frank, and it’s raining dramatically, so I duck into what here in Denver might be the lobby of a bank, hoping to collect my gatherings with my phone. 

Water pools from me onto the pristine marble flooring (because all of the flooring in Vienna seems to be marble and pristine) and I think I’m in a library until the not-librarian calls me out in harsh, angry German (because German has a way of sounding harsh and angry even when it isn’t) to purchase a ticket or take my dripping body right out of here. I clumsily buy entry into what I now identify as a museum, then sacrifice my purse and phone for security reasons. 

Here I am, in Vienna, completely lost, without a phone to bail me out, in a windowed space roughly the size of a walk-in closet, untethered, out of sorts, and feeling very much sorry for myself. I’m trying to disappear from the eyes of the not-librarian, self-consciously wiping the floor with the bottom of my coat and there, on the nearest table in this isolation, is a stack of –what?!

A stack of napkins! 

Restaurant napkins! 

And do you know what this tiny museum in a different world is exhibiting? The art of Joan Salas! And do you know what Joan Sallas has been studying for decades? 

Napkin folds! 

I have landed in a contemporary napkin fold exhibition! 

There among the swans and flowers and fans for nearly two hours I am not lost, but rather found. I’m both reminded of my life and removed from it in the escape of a cotton and linen meditation on 

The Connectedness of it All.