Cabin Fever

T he 73-year-old in the baseball-style cap could not look happier. It's 10:30 on a January morning, the winds are less than gale force, the sun is peeking through some clouds, and as he bends over on the first tee at the Eisenhower Golf Course in Crownsville, Bruno Heidik doesn't even need the little hammer he used last week to bash his golf tee into the frozen ground. The tee "slides in nicely today," says Heidik before addressing the ball, taking a long backswing and belting an impressive drive down the middle of the fairway.

Oysterback, Maryland. -- There was a big snowstorm last week, and it was a while before the plows got down to Oysterback, so most people were stuck at home for a couple of days. Worse, the cable went down and stayed down for almost a week.Without their electronic babysitter, most people were getting pretty squirrely by the end of the first day. By the second day, if Satan had come around Oysterback with a satellite dish, even Reverend Briscoe might have at least listened to his sales pitch.

As seems to be true every Saturday, there's not much on tonight. Let's hope the snow lets up enough to allow folks to venture outside.* "Wide World of Sports" (4:30 p.m.-6 p.m., WMAR, Channel 2) -- The granddaddy of all sports anthology-shows opens its 36th season of bringing viewers the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat (that poor ski jumper is still falling off the ramp). Today's coverage includes taped figure skating from the World Challenge of Champions in London. ABC.* "Encomium: A Tribute to Led Zeppelin" (11:30 p.m.-12:30 p.m., WMAR, Channel 2)

Toy CaldwellMarshall Tucker BandSPARTANBURG, S.C. -- Toy T. Caldwell Jr., former lead guitar player and singer for the Marshall Tucker Band, died yesterday, and the cause was under investigation, a coroner said.Mr. Caldwell's body was found by his wife, Abbie Good Caldwell, at their home in Moore, about 80 miles northwest of Columbia, said Bill Doble, vice president of music for Cabin Fever Entertainment, for whom Mr. Caldwell recorded. Mr. Doble said Mr. Caldwell, 45, had been ill with influenza and bronchitis.

After a week cooped up at home with her parents, Tyra Smith, 2, finally found happiness outside at the Inner Harbor."Look at the birds," Tyra squealed, as she tossed another Saltine cracker to an adoring flock of ducks and pigeons at the Baltimore tourist spot.This was the first real winter for Tyra and her mom and dad, who are from Louisiana, and they had to take advantage of yesterday's sunny weather."She's been bouncing off the walls," said Jackie Smith, "and this is the closest we're going to see to spring for a while."

One of these days will be the first day of the rest of your life.One of these days, the snow will stop falling, your sidewalk will be all shoveled, your car will be dug out, even your street may be cleared.If all of the above doesn't apply to you, today will at least be a start, with temperatures above freezing and no snow, sleet or freezing rain in the forecast.So, what do you do to relieve the fever now that the door to the cabin is finally being unlocked?Here are at least a few possibilities.

They sipped cooler-chilled mimosas. They relaxed on leather couches and watched satellite TV with surround sound. And as wind whistled through the rigging, one man dreamt of the high seas, even though he could still make out the sign for Einstein's Bagels across the parking lot from the dock. The people who winter aboard yachts and sailboats at Annapolis's City Dock weathered the worst winter storm in 81 years in style. One woman shoveled her deck with a spatula, to avoid nicking the expensive wood.

I love the language of garden catalogs. In those buoyant descriptions lie all the promise and optimism of spring. That's where the trouble starts. For I, the cabin-fevered gardener, am the one with all that optimism, and the catalogs know it. As many other gardeners have learned the hard way, the language of catalogs is as full of hidden nuances and codes as any foreign tongue. Some of it is fairly straightforward. Take, for instance, the set of ideograms which many catalogs now use as a kind of shorthand.

I need to say this fairly fast because it's been a good 10 minutes since I last shoveled the back walk -- my only remaining link with the World Before Now -- and I need to get back out there. Of course, some people might seriously question why I'm digging out the back path since the only thing it connects me to is my garage, which, by the way, has roughly six feet of drifted snow leaning against it.But what the heck! I've got to keep some small connection between me and the World Before Now. Why?