Daughter

It's not as damn fine as a good cuppa joe or some cherry pie from the Double R diner, but ''The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer,'' by Jennifer Lynch (Pocket Books, $8.95) is still a valuable companion for the true "Twin Peaks" fanatic.Of all the characters in the supersonic prime-time soap opera, we know the least about the murdered Laura Palmer. So Lynch, the daughter of series creator David Lynch, fills in the gaps with a diary that stretches from her 12th birthday until a few days before her death.

In the title essay of his book ''Fathers Playing Catch with Sons,'' the poet Donald Hall writes:''Baseball is fathers and sons . . . the generations, looping backward forever with a million apparitions of sticks and balls. . . . Baseball is fathers and sons playing catch, lazy and murderous, wild and controlled, the profound archaic song of birth, growth, age and death. This diamond encircles what we are . . . joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.''Yeah, yeah. And what about the daughters, bub?

If you are an aspiring first novelist who is not also a supermodel, senator, serial killer or TV anchorperson, you face two difficult tasks: You must actually write your own book, and you must rely primarily on literary merit for publicity. And you can't look to publishers for much encouragement. It is easier for them to create instant novelists from the casts of sitcoms or Court TV.All the same, real writers keep emerging from the vast untelevised wilderness, with nothing to distinguish them but the quality of their books.

When it comes to telling the whole truth and nothing but, teen-agers rank right up there with tobacco companies. As a matter of fact, I believe cigarette manufacturers are not secretly marketing to our children. They, and all the other scoundrels of the world, are secretly learning from them the black art of information control. Let me provide the facts as they revealed themselves, and you can decide for yourself if I am correct. My 15-year-old daughter, who has been given the green light for something resembling a social life now that she has passed through the vulnerable naivete of freshman year, asks if she can spend the night with her friend, Kate.

It is just under a year until our wedding, and I can't help but think about how things will change or how things will stay the same.  Sure, we will file our taxes differently and my name will change but what will the main differences be? I think it's important to hold on to those who are closest to me now. I know this can be hard wihen starting new families but it is so important.  I may become a wife but I'll still be a daughter, I'll still be a sister, I'll still be a friend.

WASHINGTON -- One week after a foreign court all but cut off a Virginia father's ties to one daughter in a celebrated family dispute, a court reportedly has taken similar action to distance him from his second daughter.Dr. Eric Foretich, a McLean, Va., oral surgeon and the father in an international child-custody tangle, conceded in an interview yesterday that he had now "lost both children."The two children are a 10-year-old daughter who lives in McLean with her mother, Sharon Sullivan, who was Dr. Foretich's second wife; and Hilary Foretich, 8, who lives in New Zealand with her mother, Dr. Elizabeth Morgan, Dr. Foretich's third wife.

Q. I have 8-year-old and 4-year-old daughters who are as different as night and day. About a year ago, I separated from their father, then got divorced. He was a lousy father who never spent any time with them alone. The girls and I now live in a house by ourselves. Their father gets them Tuesday and Thursday for about two hours and Sunday from noon to 9 p.m. He has a live-in girlfriend but claims they are just friends. The 8-year-old is afraid to spend the night with Daddy and doesn't even like to go over there.

An off-duty Baltimore police officer was robbed by a man who held her daughter at gunpoint as she was dropping the child off at a West Baltimore day care center Monday morning, police said yesterday. Authorities publicly disclosed the circumstances of the robbery more than 24 hours after the incident while detectives spent Monday chasing leads. Agent Donny Moses, a police spokesman, said detectives were seeking the public's help in the incident, which occurred in the Harlem Park neighborhood.

At first, it appeared that shock and grief drove Debbie and Mark Troch to ask all those questions, over and over again, and to obsess about the death of their teen-aged daughter. But it turns out the Troches were more rational than you'd expect parents in mourning to be. Their angry suspicions had considerable foundation, and their recollections of the last 13 1/2 hours of their daughter's life appear to have been all too accurate.Readers of this column might recall that the Troches came away from St. Joseph Hospital that Good Friday morning 1992 with lots of questions:Had they erred in bringing Tiffany to the Towson hospital the evening before, after she fell 8 feet from a rope swing near her home in Baltimore County?

A 37-year-old Druid Heights man was arrested and charged with first-degree murder yesterday in the death of his 3-month-old daughter on Friday, police said. O'Dell W. Sullivan of the 1800 block of Madison Ave. was being held at the Central Booking and Intake Center last night without bail. The state medical examiner's office ruled the death a homicide yesterday, saying the infant died from blunt-force trauma. Sullivan told police his daughter, Shahada, stopped breathing while he was at a neighborhood convenience store.