Thanks, Pete Seeger

-->

Our stories and our environment spin each other reflexively. Both change endlessly in an intimate dance of culture. I have been reminded of this fact by a recent notification from Twitter about a storyteller with a banjo.

When I was a teenager, I the good fortune to be able to hear live music on a regular basis. I lived outside of Washington, DC so attending concerts by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Andres Segovia, Arthur Rubenstein, Steve Goodman, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and Peter, Paul and Mary was as simple as buying tickets. I thought I was just hearing good music, impressing my dates and tending to my libido. It never occurred to me that interacting with culture was shaping me as a storyteller or that I had the ability to alter my culture and environment.

No Song Means the Hat is Back

The hat is back! Last summer we asked readers to suggest an appropriate song to be included in the funeral for my cowboy hat. Apparently, we failed to offer enough Story Chip Ginger Snaps as a reward to entice suggestions that would allow the funeral to proceed. The hat remained hanging on the horn of a well used saddle (the only adequate storage spot for a true cowboy relic) while we hoped for inspiration and looked for a truly perfect cemetery plot.

Instead, the drought has shifted away from Texas and is now scorching other parts of the country. Here in Austin, we have just under six inches of rain above the seasonal average. There is hope that the lakes might look like lakes again and all manner of flora and fauna have joined the resurgence. The downside of this rain is that there is more outside work to do. So, the hat is back starring in new Story Chips.

You can't Cheat at Solitaire

There is another study that has been released that shows that the students in our schools find their schoolwork too easy. I wish that I could launch into a paragraph or two that would decry the shameful decline in education, but my experience was that going to school was boring and definitely not difficult. Those moments in school that offered real stretching for my interests and abilities were few and far between, enough so that I remember those incidents clearly.

When I think of boredom and school, what I really remember was the long summer when I was 14 spent in bed recovering from mononucleosis. In a matter of weeks, I lost a quarter of my body weight and did not have the strength to climb the stairs to my bedroom without stopping to rest halfway there. About all that I could do was lie in bed and read or play solitaire, when I could keep my eyes open. That was boring! Boredom is its own challenge for even the least inquisitive of souls, and for one with a restless curiosity was an opportunity to overcome the ennui of my existence.

People Who Like Ginger

Digital cooking, well the cooking may not be digital, but there is no doubt that the Internet has certainly changed the way we think about storing and sharing recipes. When I first read a cookbook (yes, one made from paper) electric mixers were not in every home and microwaves and food processors were in the dream stages. Now, you can compare a dozen different recipes from a Google search and pick the one you like.

This is perfect for someone like me who has always seen recipes as a place to start, seasoning to taste and substitutions welcome. My father started me on that path the morning he decided to fix French toast while my mother was away. We had run out of milk, so he poured in Hawaiian Punch. The result was fairly normal as long as you ignored the deep red color and the resulting squick factor. Combine this with my mother's belief that spice packages were part of the decoration of the kitchen, not necessarily meant to be opened, and I was launched into years of kitchen experimentation, and not all of it successful.

We all have stories from our time spent cooking with friends, family and for special occasions. Many of us have collected these family cooking traditions in notebooks or boxes of file cards that include both the recipe and the story of its creation or the gathering that made it famous. At Story Chip, the recipes are interesting, but we are more interested in the stories and how they document the way we live with each other. After the jump, my story of ginger snaps.

In Italy, Thinking of Austin

Classwork

After a drought that hung around like the house guest from a “b” film, spring arrived with drenching rains bringing wonderful relief to central Texas. We have been reminded that the natural color of grass is green, that trees provide a shady refuge from the Sun, some plants produce cooling treats for hot weather meals and sadly, the lawn mower that has waited patiently for two years in case it might be needed, now requires major repairs. In the week leading up to Memorial Day, we harvested the first cherry tomatoes from the “volunteer” tomato plants that sprang from the memories of last year's burned out garden and read an email from a native Texan in the midst of a chance of a lifetime trip to Italy.

Italian spring this year included an apparent mafia bombing of a school and a substantial earthquake, but events that made the network talking heads take note do not show up in this correspondence. Imagine a man retired and pursuing his stone carving passion who made connections with carvers in the US who provided introductions to a master carver in Italy. The introduction blossomed into a month of study in northern Italy while his wife samples the more traditional tourist itinerary of Rome and Paris. The story in following email compares cultures, climates and standards that we like to call home.

Breathing Creates Stories

I have spent a lot of time since Story Chip began, in discussions with people who try to convince me that their stories are not interesting or that they do not know how to tell them. I am lucky in that I know that all our stories are interesting and compelling when we tell them. They frequently lose something when someone else tells them for us or polishes them up in some way.

When you create a web site devoted to telling stories and creating pages full of people sharing their experiences, you surely generate your own sensitivity to examples of the simplest nature that become emotional blockbusters. I have a short list of those occasions and some great photos that follow the jump.

Unshared Valentine Stories

The reason that February possesses fewer days than any other month can be explained best as suicide prevention. If we had to wait through additional days of winter tinged with hints of spring, the tease would prove to be too much for all but the strongest mind to endure. (How do those living in the southern hemisphere endure August?) Surely, the exact mid point of the month provides a mandatory break for a moment of romanticism and foreshadowing the regenerative nature of spring.

Story Chip does not hope to question the nature of the calendar or alter the course of holidays, but we do hope to provide a platform for stories that help us to understand them. Our archive currently holds only a single story with a Valentine's Day tag, and that story is about the Beatles first trip to the United States.

SOPA/PIPA puts an end to Story Chip?

Tell congress to do a better job of preventing digital piracy! SOPA or PIPA would make Story Chip impossible to continue.