Grass

Sensing that I was in way too fine a mood and needing to get in touch with the customary gloom that surrounds me, I went out yesterday and inspected my lawn.The lawn squats like a giant ugly toad on all four sides of the house.It has more ruts and holes in it than the Ho Chi Minh Trail, circa 1968. And now, as spring comes grudgingly to the Mid-Atlantic region, the grass is a lovely shade of grayish brown, reminiscent of an abandoned strip-mining site in Appalachia.Staring at the lawn and envisioning the work it would take to make this eyesore even semi-presentable, I became more and more depressed.

WIMBLEDON, England -- And then there are the grass courts at Wimbledon.Just like that, they come into view, green, fresh and intimidating. An endless season of clay, hard courts and carpets can't prepare anyone for what it's like to actually play on grass.That is Wimbledon's blessing and its curse, to be put on display for the next two weeks beginning tomorrow at the All England Tennis Club.In the circus that is the world tennis tour, Wimbledon stands alone, the original major tournament on the original surface.

Within the next week, please send old photos of children doing homework to Way Back When, Sun Magazine, 501 N. Calvert St., Baltimore, Md. 21278. You must include caption information and your daytime phone number. Also, enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope if you'd like your photo returned. If your photo is your only copy, please send a good-quality duplicate, not the original. No faxes or newspaper clippings, please.

Crabwalk, by Gunter Grass. Harcourt. 240 pages. $25. Information is the ultimate waste product of our age. Gunter Grass' new novel, Crabwalk, deliberately clutters up its pages with masses of irrelevant detail, as it traces the quest by the son of a woman who survived the torpedoing of a German ship during World War II, to reconstruct the event. But in this ultimate postmodernist novel, the narrator lacks definition, and, like the reader of this book, seems buried in the information he is collecting.

"Too Far Afield," by Gunter Grass. Harcourt. 658 pages. $30. The Nobel Prize awarded last year to Gunter Grass seems one of the better literary decisions of those Swedish Academicians. From "The Tin Drum" on, his novels have been meditations on his native Germany, cast in a mode somewhere between symbolism and allegory. Like Germany itself, he prefers other things to realism. Grass always takes an idea and spreads a generous amount of prose on it. This time it's German reunification -- a topic on which he surely should be worth reading.

One thousand volunteers turned out along Delaware's oceanfront shoreline this weekend to plant beach grass in hopes of preventing erosion from future storms.The turnout was the largest in the three-year history of the Planting O' the Green program on Delaware's beaches. Groups gathered on beaches from Kitts Hummock to Fenwick Island Saturday.

When President Clinton unveiled an energy tax proposal in his speech to Congress last month, shock waves rolled through the offices of Washington's energy lobbyists. But for some of Washington's hottest lobbying shops -- ones that specialize in orchestrating grass-roots mail and phone blitzes to members of Congress from the hinterlands -- the proposed tax has generated barrels of money.The American Energy Alliance, a coalition of more than 1,300 companies and trade groups including the American Petroleum Institute, has ponied up a million dollars to Burson-Marsteller Inc., the public relations giant, to nurture protests in 20 states against the tax, which Mr. Clinton wants to base on the energy content of fuels.

Has your lawn looked a little ragged lately? Then give it new life by planting the seeds of success -- shade-tolerant grasses. A shaded lawn competes with trees and shrubs for available sunlight, water and nutrients, so it's important to use a seed that is up to the challenge.Fine-leaved fescues and rough bluegrasses, such as LaserPoa trivialis, are a perfect example. Developed specifically to grow well in the shade, these varieties are quick to establish. Select fine-leaved fescues for dry, shaded areas and rough bluegrasses for damp shade.

For years, Ivan Lendl claimed allergies made him stay away from Wimbledon, and judging from his subsequent difficulties there, no one will dispute the fact that grass courts made him ill.Whether or not it was a case of hay fever though, well, that's a different story.Arantxa Sanchez Vicario, the young Spaniard who won the French Open title at age 17, once was asked how she felt about the surface and spouted, "Grass is for cows."Word has it she stole that line from Lendl.Love it or hate it, there is no in between when talking about both the oldest and most infuriating court surface in tennis.

After 14 years of laboratory testing, scientists with the U.S. Soil Conservation Service said yesterday that they have isolated an aquatic grass that will help stop the degradation of the Chesapeake Bay."Bayshore" smooth cord grass grips eroding soils and protects shorelines better than common varieties of cord grass, said the scientists, who offered the new variety for public use during an afternoon ceremony at the University of Maryland's Center for Estuarine and Environmental Studies at Horn Point in Cambridge.