I Cried

It's an especially wonderful time of the year for a young Baltimore couple. On Dec. 12 (or 12/12/12), Joshua Hager, 26, proposed to his girlfriend, Kate MacDonald, 27, in front of a Baltimore-themed house on 34th Street in Hampden, which is well-known for its colorful holiday display.   "We had planned on going to see the lights because we haven't been in a while," explains Kate. "And [Joshua's] mother convinced him to let his little brother go so he could take pictures. He specifically wanted to do it in front of the house with Natty Boh and the Utz Girl because everyone says we're 'so Baltimore.'"   Kate and Joshua met at a bar while attending Frostburg State University in Frostburg, Md., and began dating in October 2007.

The crowd at Club 4100 went silent."This is stupid football!" someone shouted. "Stupid!""Is Tagliabue in the stands somewhere?" Chris Cheswick cried, floating the conspiracy theory immediately.Lui Passaglia kicked a field goal as time expired, and B.C. edged the Baltimore CFLs for the Grey Cup, 26-23.Defeat stung. It always does.But at Club 4100, a bar-restaurant in Brooklyn, this didn't quite match the crushing despair of Super Bowl III."When I was a kid and that happened, I cried for a week," Cheswick said.

When Bill Clinton took the podium to address the country in January 1993, I was moved to tears. Here, then, was my first president. My parents had had all the presidents up to that point. Here was a man of my generation. Married to the working mother of a school-aged child who was his educational and professional equal. To someone like me. Mr. Clinton acknowledged the passing of the "greatest generation" when he thanked outgoing President George H.W. Bush for his 50 years of service to the country.

WITH SNOW forecast for this weekend, I'll probably get a little nervous. No, I'm not among the legions of Baltimoreans who raid grocery store shelves of milk, bread and toilet paper at the hint of snow.My trepidation centers around my mode of transportation: I am a disabled person who must use a wheelchair. A heavy snowstorm or a glazing of ice may leave me house bound for several days.Almost everyone looks back on the winter of 1994 and shudders: The unusually long stretches of bad weather forced schools and many businesses to close for days at a time.

AK Slaughter, the dual voices of Emily Slaughter and Aran Keating, have been making music in Baltimore since their college days at Goucher, mixing fast with slow and musical simplicity with quirky complexity. Their answers for this week's Like/Dislike are almost as entertaining as their sharp lyrics and funky beats. Don't miss them at the Fifth Annual All Rap Round Robin at 9 p.m. Friday at Floristree, featuring 12 different talents. They'll be releasing their new split EP with RapDragons there.

MEMORIES may fade, but the matrix of emotions on which they are inscribed does not. That's why, watching television, I cried. The scene was a military base where the soldiers and sailors of the gulf war were joyfully, tearfully reunited with their families.My own emotional surge caught me completely by surprise. Up to that point my sincere appreciation of our men and women in the gulf was tempered by the fact of the relative ease and speed with which their mission was accomplished. Now here I was, embarrassed by the tears evoked in this televised homecoming.

In the early 1960s, Pennsylvania Avenue was the cultural Nil of Baltimore's black community and the Sphinx Club shone like a diamond on that shimmering river of lights."

LITTLETON, Col. -- That first night, after surviving the bloody four-hour siege of her school, Lisa Cosgrove took refuge in the place a frightened child instinctively turns to -- mom's bed.But there was no haven, not that night or perhaps ever."

Let's talk about the wisdom of the storm called Sandy: that anything can happen to anyone - at any time. Even to someone like me. I live in Maryland. I am a divorced mother proudly raising a teenager and a tweenager. I work at one of the largest employers in the state. Most of Sandy's damage was in New York and New Jersey, with Maryland suffering relatively little harm. But not everyone in our state escaped unscathed. I was without electricity from Monday, Oct. 29 to Wednesday, Oct. 31. It was very cold in our house.

It's been almost 13 years since Brandi Care Hicks tried to end her life, and the spiraling depression that engulfed it, by jumping from the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. As she told parents of Arundel High School students about her near-tragedy Tuesday night, the Severna Park resident visibly choked up once — when speaking about the joys she would have missed had she lost her life that day. Hicks, 29, spoke about her ordeal during "Mind, Body and Soul: A Mental Health Awareness Evening," which focused on identifying stressors in teens' lives.