Daisy

Jose Marquez was building a swing set in his back yard with three seats, one for each of his children. Now, he is unsure what to do. "Daisy's gone, so I don't know how many seats we need now," he said, staring at the half-finished structure at his Columbia home. Life doesn't make much sense for Marquez these days. Daisy Ruby Marquez, his 8-year-old daughter, died on the evening of Aug. 12 in an accident on Coleman Thomas Road while bicycle riding with her half-brother, Marcos Ochoa, 13. Police said Daisy and Marcos pulled their bicycles onto the side of the road as a pickup truck and trailer approached.

"I am interested in reality, with the texture of ordinary life, and the way people appear and relate. I like to write about survivors." This is Carol Shields speaking about writing and providing a framework from which to view "The Stone Diaries."Ms. Shields, a poet and novelist, has won numerous awards, and "The Stone Diaries" is a finalist for the prestigious Booker Prize. Although Ms. Shields has not received the critical acclaim that fellow Canadian Margaret Atwood has, her books seem to me as accomplished and as elegant, perhaps more so.A structurally flawless novel told as memoir, "The Stone Diaries" holds photographs, a family tree, letters, invitations, news clippings and other such autobiographical details.

LAWRENCE S. "Straight Eight" departed this life on Saturday, February 12, 2005 at the Holy Cross Rehabilitation Center. Beloved husband of the late Catherine E. Jensen; Devoted father of Leona C. Jensen. He also leaves one sister-in-law, nieces, nephews, cousins, other relatives and friends. Family will receive friends at the Daisy United Methodist Church, 2685 Daisy Road, Woodbine, MD on Thursday, February 17, 2005 from 10:00 A.M. until funeral services at 11:00 A.M. Rev. D. Tate, Officiating.

The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman, by Alice Mattison. William Morrow. 275 pages. $23.95 Daisy Andalusia is fiftysomething and a woman who is "good half the time." She is living in New Haven, Conn., on the fringes of Yale University, on the fringes of a marriage and on the fringes of other people's lives. The man to whom she is half-heartedly married is Pekko Roberts, a slumlord by default -- he is too kind to charge poor people the rent he would need to fix up their apartments. Daisy used to teach and organize conferences, but when she saw the back seat of a parked car piled high with junk, she put a note on the windshield: "I'm expensive, but I can help."

When last we left Daisy Duck, she was huddled in a nest under a bushin a backyard in Linthicum, sitting on 10 eggs.The mallard was still there early Thursday evening when Dena LeCompte went out for a look. Daisy was at her post, but LeCompte saw that now she had company. Three little duckling faces poked up from behind her, getting theirfirst fuzzy glimpses of the world.Early the next morning, LeCompte went out for another look. She found the brood had grown overnight from three to 10 ducklings.

* Editor's note: This Halloween, a recipe for a monster backfires, leaving an unhappy hag with an unexpected visitor. Some time ago, somewhere not too far away, there was a wooded swamp. In this wooded swamp stood a rickety old hovel that seemed to lean toward the moon. In the hovel, within the wooded swamp, lived an evil old hag who was the second-meanest creature alive. She was the second-meanest creature only because a cat named Hisss lived with her. The cat hated the hag and the hag hated the cat, and that is just how it had been for as long as either of them could remember.

Helen Wilson is doing her part for the survival of the rare white rhinoceros: standing for hours on end at the Baltimore Zoo and looking for things that would force most folks to avert their eyes. She jots down any signs that the zoo's two rhinos are about to mate, and the signals aren't pretty. In this case, a come-hither look doesn't involve batted eyelashes. A female rhino in the mood will curl her tail out of the way and back into the male. A randy male will sniff his potential mate's dung, then do the same to her backside.

Child of My Heart, by Alice McDermott. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 208 pages. $23. Alice McDermott writes beautiful sentences. She takes the most mundane or awful sights and turns them into poetry. In describing a drunken neighbor asleep on his lawn, his pants down around his ankles, she writes: "I got a quick, bone-chilling glimpse of a mound of a pale backside, as gray and lonesome as a sand dune in winter." Like her National Book Award winner, Charming Billy, McDermott's new book is set on the east end of Long Island.

*Amanda Gorsuch, a nurse at at Mercy Medical Center, is being honored with the DAISY Award For Extraordinary Nurses. The award is part of the DAISY Foundation's program to recognize nurses. The foundation, based in Glen Ellen, Calif., was established in memory of J. Patrick Barnes, who died in 1999 at the age of 33 from complications of an autoimmune disease. The nursing care Barnes received inspired the award. Gorsuch is the first DAISY honoree in Maryland. She was nominated by a patient who was touched by her care.

The Pasadena Theater Company's production of "On a Clear Day You CanSee Forever" comes across a lot like the musical itself -- pleasant and appealing enough without being particularly memorable."