Dana

On August 14, 1834, 160 years ago this Sunday, the brig Pilgrim, a small square-rigged sailing vessel, warped out of Boston harbor bound for the California coast, a voyage that would produce one of the most important personal narratives of life at sea and forever change the face of maritime literature.On board the Pilgrim was Richard Henry Dana Jr., a proper Bostonian with his sophomore year at Harvard just completed and his eyesight failing after a bout of measles. By shipping as an ordinary seaman, Dana hoped that the rigors of a long sea voyage would improve his health and restore the weakened vision that had required him to leave college.

AN OLYMPIAN from Hampstead thrilled the Women's Club of Hampstead last week with tales of his cycling adventures. Brian Walton, a road and track cyclist, recently returned from the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. He has raced with the Canadian National Cycling Team since 1991. Walton has a family connection to the women's club. He is married to the granddaughter of longtime club member Marilyn Gill. Gill's granddaughter Dana Walton is an eighth-grade reading teacher at North Carroll Middle School.

Talk Talk T.C. Boyle Viking / 340 pages / $25.95 What's the cost of being 20 minutes late for a dentist's appointment? Running a stop sign? Having a cross word with your boss? In the real world, maybe an extra hour in the waiting room; a $40 ticket; getting the fish-eye for a week at work. But in T.C. Boyle's new novel, Talk Talk, these inconsequential events do not pass into the realm of the quickly forgotten. Instead, they are the small jagged snips that unravel three people's lives.

Deep down, Dana already knew the truth when she headed to the publichealth clinic on that blustery January day.She had missed her period and tested positive on a home pregnancy kit. The evidence was hard to ignore, even though she wasn't sick in the mornings.Still, when the doctor told her she was three months pregnant, she was surprised. It was at least a month more than she expected.Then Dana discovered she was carrying twins. When she called to tell the man she believed was the father, he hung up. The breakup was another blow for Dana, who asked to withhold her last name because she's fighting for child support.

We cannot let another year go by without mentioning the Sirkin Letter. Volume 16, No. 1 arrived a couple of weeks ago, and it was typically lengthy (six pages this year), lively and loaded with information about Steve Sirkin, 45; his wife, Dana, of indeterminate age, and their children, Adam, 15, and Laura, 10.The Sirkins, who live in Reisterstown, have been putting out Laura, Adam, Dana & Steve's News since 1978. Those 800 of us on the mailing list have watched Adam and Laura grow up, the family move to Salt Lake and back again, Dana's work as an occupational therapist, Steve's as a teacher at Old Court Middle School, their involvement at synagogue, vacations, sports (and sports injuries)

Not much went right for No. 5 Severna Park in the 24 hours before last night's matchup with South River.The Falcons had lost an emotional game to second-ranked Arundel Wednesday night.Senior center Jennifer Holmes got stuck in traffic late yesterday afternoon and did not arrive until game time for South River.Severna Park coach Kevin McGrath was also delayed by the major traffic jam (due to an oil spill on Route 97) around Severna Park and didn't get to the game until shortly after it started.

Sitting in a booster seat on the witness stand, 6-year-old Dana leaned forward to answer a prosecutor's question: "Why don't you live with your mom anymore?" "Because Neef shot her," the boy said. He pointed to the defendant, in a chair just a few feet away. "He shot her and then he left." In another Baltimore courtroom days later, a prosecutor asked 10-year-old Jose, tidily dressed in a silver shirt and tie, "Do you know why you came to court today?" "I was there when my dad was killed," he answered.

"Migrations," the show of three artists' works at School 33, deals with migrations of two kinds: visual and mental. According to the gallery's statement, in the process of creation, each artist's work goes through a migration (or simply a change), either from abstract to representational or the other way around. And these changes relate to the artists' mental processes, involving the physical, psychological and spiritual realms.It's an interesting theme for a show, and the artists fit it well, though they aren't all equally successful.

WASHINGTON -- Recognizing individual accomplishments in a State of the Union address is a modern presidential tradition. Last night, they included Rex, a bomb-sniffing German shepherd who occupied a seat alongside his handler, Air Force Tech. Sgt. Jamie Dana. Both were injured - Dana severely, Rex slightly - in Iraq last June when a bomb exploded under their vehicle. Even before she recovered from her injuries, Dana, 27, began fighting to adopt Rex, but military regulations - and federal law - said the five-year-old dog could not be decommissioned until he hit the working-dog retirement age of 10 to 14. Members of Congress took up Dana's cause, writing a measure that allowed exceptions to the adoption rule and attaching it to legislation Bush signed last month.

EIGHTH-GRADE girls from William H. Lemmel Middle School took a bus to Annapolis a few weeks ago to testify in support of a school-safety bill they had helped draft. The state delegate, Lisa Gladden, introduced the bill for them in the General Assembly. The girls had the Columbine nightmare and other school shootings in mind, and they weren't necessarily commenting on conditions at Lemmel, one of 21 city schools that received a nice cash award from the state last year for significant improvements in test scores.