STORYTELLING | by SHERRY STRIPLING

WHEN MY FIDDLE-PLAYING FATHER DIED LAST SPRING, the universal response from friends was regret over what they hadn’t said or done.

These friends, mostly younger musicians, treated him like gold ― taking him to concerts, making over his tunes, dancing with him. Regrets were the last emotion my father would have wanted.

© SHERRY STRIPLING

“Why didn’t I visit him that last day at the hospital?” “Why didn’t I bake that pecan pie that I promised?” “I should have learned more of his tunes.”

So I created a “No Regrets box” for his memorial celebration. We invited people to write down anything left unsaid, anything left undone on a piece of paper, put it in the box ― and then consider it done when my sister and I burned the notes in a beach fire near the old family home.

The response was astounding. People lined up in front of the regrets box. We got urgent calls the next day:  “I remembered another one. Is it too late to add it?”

Two months later, my sister and I read the notes and burned them one by one, watching the ashes fall into burning coals.

“I regret I didn’t dance with Lee more.” “I regret not staining your fiddle again as you had asked.” “I wish I had been as open and friendly and grateful as you, Lee.” “I regret not spending more time studying what a kind man you were, Lee, and learning to be one more myself.”

We cried with almost every note. Afterwards, we felt refreshed, but also determined.

It was clear people understood our father as he was: “A sweet, gentle soul.” But the notes also reminded us to waste no time in telling people we love them. Burning regrets helps, but it’s better to cut them off at the pass.

SHARON STONE WASN’T THE FIRST Hollywood star to wear a man’s white dress shirt and look glamorous, but perhaps she’s the most recent. Katharine Hepburn and Lauren Bacall appropriated the iconic style decades ago, knotting the shirttails at the waist, rolling up the sleeves and wearing “his” shirt with tailored slacks or a waist-enhancing skirt.

SOURCE: iSTOCKPHOTO.COM

I love wearing my husband’s shirts. Crisp and clean, the 100-percent-cotton shirting feels cool and pleasant against my arms and shoulders. Basic white looks classic; Oxford stripes are preppy and playful; chambray exudes weekend casual. Add pearls and you’re ready for a night on the town.

The men’s dress shirt — for her — will never go out of style.

Fashion designers often reinterpret the dress shirt to fit a woman’s silhouette. Recently, I discovered the work of Seattle designer Farinaz Taghavi. Her fascination with the dress shirt, cut for the female body, is expressed in luxurious fabrics and colors, interpreted with self-tie belts, sexy waistlines and wider collars and cuffs. Yet that tailored, classic element is still present in Farinaz’s designs.

On her website she explains: Women “can keep the sleeves open, pull them up, put their collar down or style (the shirt) differently throughout the day. I want women to make their own statements — my shirt is meant to support them, not dominate them.”

It’s brilliant to see how Farinaz has tapped into women’s love for tailored shirts, either the original guy’s button-down or the feminized gal’s shirt. We wear them to make a personal statement rather than follow a prescribed fashion trend-of-the-moment.

And if we manage to add a touch of old Hollywood glamour while doing so, it’s even better.

THE INTERNET IS CROWDED WITH ALL SORTS OF ADVICE FOR RAISING CHICKENS in a small-scale environment, such as an urban backyard. You can watch a bevy of You Tube videos on DIY coop-building, selection of rare and exotic breeds, and the care and feeding of chicks.

SOURCE: MODERNCOOP.COM

But it wasn’t until several of my design-savvy friends became hen owners that I realized how cutting-edge chickens can be. No longer the domain of the alternative set, chicken ownership is indeed a mainstream phenomenon. Eat an omelet made with just-gathered eggs and you’ll be persuaded, too.

Chicken-coop design is an important consideration. My friend Kathy owns a fetching structure affectionately called the Palais de Poulet (yes, it has a turret and leaded-glass windows). Another gal pal, also named Kathy, decorated her coop with a colorful mosaic mural of handmade tiles. I’ve seen chickens take up residence in a converted children’s playhouse and live in a beautiful piece of miniature architecture — cupola included.

Then there are prefab coops. The explosion of prefabricated architecture doesn’t relate only to homes for humans. Here are some of the most interesting ready-to-go chicken abodes around:

Henspa: Egganic Industries, a mom-and-pop coop-maker in Virginia, sells a wide range of easy-to-assemble wood kits, including the “Henhut,” which for a little more than $300 can house a small backyard egg-production operation.

Eglu: Imported from the U.K. and now available to North American chicken owners, this futuristic hut is attached to a wire “chicken run” and can even be ordered with a pair of hens. Kits begin at $495.

Modern Coop: Shaped like a vintage trailer and made from reclaimed  boards, this witty coop houses chickens while adding retro style to your yard. $700 plus additional costs for accessories.

LONG BEFORE iPods and built-in DVD players, American kids had to find ways to pass the time in the family car.

SOURCE: iSTOCKPHOTO.COM

During the 1960s and early 1970s, my younger brothers and I were three of those kids. Books, crosswords, card games and art projects were part of Mom’s bag of time-passing tricks. But it was our Dad who made the miles fly by between Massachusetts and Illinois; Indiana and California. Here are the activities I remember fondly:

• Singing rounds of nonsense songs that Dad probably learned working at summer camps in the ’40s and ’50s. “B-I-N-G-O,” “Go tell Aunt Rhody,” “I’m my own Grandpa,” are a few that we remember. Silly, yes, but we worked hard to memorize all the verses and we each had our favorite car-trip song.
• Dad created a ridiculous game called “Turkey”, with points earned based on the first letter of any farm animal we spotted. “Horse” earned 8 points since “H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet (chickens and cows, 3 points; pigs, 16 points, etc). To win automatically, one needed to see a turkey, 50 points. You can only imagine how seldom this happened, if ever. But we still kept hoping a turkey farm was just around the next bend.
• Dad crafted another wild mealtime game at supermarkets along the way. He gave everyone 50 cents to $1 for our under-$10 family lunch. The game was to shop for food and trade, share or combine our ingredients to create a meal. This sounds pretty sad, but actually it was a blast.

While it may not have been super-healthy, we sure had a fun summer vacation tradition, and we never realized how much our folks had to pinch pennies to pull off the trip in the first place. Even though our journeys were completely low-tech and low-budget, they inspired a lifetime of stories that my brothers and I still tell today. Sometimes I wish my own two sons could experience those summers. I bet I’d never again hear one of them say, “I’m bored” or “When are we getting there?”

SUMMER VISITS WITH BELOVED FRIENDS AND FAMILY are a great time to add to your oral-history collection. But don’t let good weather tempt you outside to record.

Chirping birds that charm you now will annoy you as you listen to the recording. Most recorders favor every decibel of airplanes, trucks and slamming doors over the details of golden memories.

National Public Radio’s StoryCorps has helped more than 50,000 people share stories since 2003. Among the recording tips the Corps offers:

Recording equipment

• Go simple with a cell phone, a tape recorder, video camera or computer.
• Go upscale with recommended digital recorders: Marantz PMD661 or the more portable Edirol R-09 (which I’ve used for years and recommend).

Choose a quiet location

• Pick a carpeted room over areas with reflective surfaces or noisy appliances.
• Shut off or remove anything that could make noise, including clocks and radios.

Test your equipment

• Wear headphones so you can hear what the recorder hears.
• Ask sample questions, test how the answers sound, then push record and begin for real.

Use a microphone

• Hold the microphone about 7 inches from your subject’s mouth.
• Use a light touch to avoid “mic-handling” sounds.

You’ll find these tips and much more in StoryCorps’ free, downloadable Do-It-Yourself kit, including interview tips and a good question generator. Don’t forget Lifestyle Insights’ earlier look at the art of the follow-up question.

Happy visiting!

WE’VE ALL BEEN THERE: driving on the freeway when some “jerk” cuts you off. My immediate response is to want to exact vengeance.

I rarely remember when I’ve been the offending party. Ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of those times, I just wasn’t paying enough attention. It was nothing personal. I was just in my own quasi-conscious world. I expected the guy behind me to be able to read my intentional mind.

What if I believed that others had good intentions and were not singling me out in a personal way? Lots of the time, people don’t respond to me in the way or time I want. I tend to interpret actions or inactions as symbols of interest, respect, acceptance or other meaning.

I have a choice. If I assume good intentions, more possibility opens up.

Remember your last mis-understanding? Imagine an “instant replay” in which their intentions were all for very good reasons and had nothing to do with you. What might happen differently?

Sure, there may be a gap between their intention and the impact on you. However, if you believe that the intentions were for good, it loosens the knot of conflict. I may not make peace on earth, but next time I’m on the freeway, there can be peace in one car.

LIVING IN A DOWNTOWN APARTMENT WITH NO DECK, I sometimes get a hankering for more gardening that our many houseplants just can’t satisfy — particularly of the edible kind.

© MOLLY MARTIN

Some herbs do just fine, especially rosemary, thyme and (sometimes) basil. Once I tried to grow mesclun in an indoor window box, only to discover that aphids like mesclun, too, and being on the third floor didn’t keep them from finding it.

Years ago I tried some fast-ripening cherry tomatoes and wound up with at least a few, but most didn’t get past the green stage. Last year the tomato itch struck again, and I scratched it by buying a plant more than a foot tall, with a couple of flowers already in bloom.

Just one of those flowers yielded a tomato, but it grew nicely, and I moved it to an even sunnier window, and watered faithfully, and staked it when it got a little heavy. It even turned red and everything looked so promising.

But then: When to pick it? There was only one, and I wanted it to be just right. Certainly I didn’t want to pick it too early and have it ripen on the kitchen counter, like store-bought tomatoes do all year long.

So I watched, and waited, and watched. And one day I saw that the skin was puckering a little. Egads. Yep, I’d waited too long, and it had started to rot. And my lonely tomato went not even into a compost pile (since we have none) to nourish someone’s future vegetables, but into the garbage. It was like flushing a dead pet goldfish down the toilet.

This year, I think, farmer’s market tomatoes.

GUIDELINES FOR CREATIVITY FOR WRITERS reminds me of an editor who pounded his fist and shouted, “By God, if you people don’t start writing more positive, upbeat stories, heads are going to roll!”

That was not the foreplay I needed for happy writing. The same is true with creativity: Being in the right mood is essential. No need for low lights or soft music, but trust is an aphrodisiac for imagination.

Tip No 1: Find the mood

Deadlines kill open thought. Whether you’re writing a story for family archives or more formal venues, allow yourself time to sidle up to a project to catch creativity by surprise.

Advice: Do the hard work of slugging out a version. Then come back fresh.

Tip No. 2: Rip it up and start over

It was dreck anyway, wasn’t it? Now re-tell the story without stopping, as you would at a party, to release creative flow. Go back and tighten.

Advice: As Annie Lamott writes in “Bird by Bird: Some Instruction on Writing and Life”: “Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.”

Tip No. 3: Mind map

Desperate? Been there many times. Write down a word or phrase that captures the heart of your story. Then, without stopping, scribble thoughts related to that idea. Your last thought is often your entry point.

Advice: Let it flow, let it flow, let it flow.

Tip No. 4: Find a peculiar perch

Take an off-angled whack at telling the story. It worked for me when I captured the creative, out-there Nancy Nipples for a newspaper story in three-act play form. And when I looked at Seattle in 1900 as if the “Y2K” debacle took me back in time instead of my computer. (Never mind when it didn’t work.)

Advice: Ask yourself, what would Timothy Leary do?

EVERY EASTER I REMEMBER A LESSON I learned when skiing in the Canadian Rockies with a group of burly backwoods men.

I wasn’t too worried about the Telemark skiing or the helicopter lift into the mountains. But I had my concerns about spending a week in a tiny canvas yurt with all of these great big men. And that was before I realized that we would be able to hear but not see each other as our wet, rank long underwear draped like seaweed from pillar and post.

Those fears came to a head the very first night. Lying wide awake long after the snorers were asleep, I heard one of the men crawling across the floor. He’d rustle in someone’s private gear, and then continue his crawl to the next bag.

“Oh, brother,” I thought. “This is going to be a long week.”

The next morning I waited for the men to discover what might be missing from their things. Nothing was gone, but something was gained: Easter eggs, chocolate, delicious and plentiful. We spent the next 20 minutes searching through kettles and socks for more, as Gus, the biggest and burliest of them all, sat and watched, delighted by his 2 a.m. stealth.

These men were former school mates. In between yearly reunions like this, they were scattered all over the frozen north. Lying in my bunk, cloaked by dangling long-johns, I listened all week as they supported each other’s trials of the previous year, showing especial tenderness to the most vulnerable in their group, a guy who had struggled with alcohol.

And once again, I learned: You can’t judge a man by his John Wayne walk.

WHEN I WAS SENTENCED TO BE MY FAMILY’S DESIGNATED HOUSE PAINTER years ago, it didn’t take long for me to discover that painting can be:

© iSTOCKIMAGE.COM

1. A form of mediation 
2. More than a little trippy

Maybe it’s the fumes, the hours of isolation or my choice of music, but my mind goes all over the place when I paint.

Some of those thoughts settle in the room forever, like sanding dust. Every time I enter the room from then on, I’m taken back to whatever was going on in my life at the time I was painting.

At my late grandparents’ house, which we rent out, I get whiffs of these memories:

• High-ceiling living room, Los Angeles Olympic Games, which I watched from atop a ladder
• Blistered west exterior, the runaway border collie pup who picked me out mid-paint job and said, “You’ll do!”
• Upstairs turquoise bedroom, my mother sorting through her old school papers in a final cleanout

The sensation is even more intense when I’m painting over the same spot in back-to-back years (bad renters). I get total flashbacks ― sight, smell, emotion ― similar to how a surgeon releases vivid memories by cutting into an old scar.

I can steer these thoughts by making sure I’m listening to upbeat music or TV programs. It’s harder when people come in, see you’re captive and confess their life woes.

My most recent project was my basement walls and ceiling in anticipation of a replacing an old TV with a home theater. Painting into the early hours of morning, I listened to a documentary on a Norwegian explorer trapped on northern ice floes for 3½ years.

Big mistake! The room looks great, but popcorn tastes like whale blubber.