Life

A dutiful son earning minimum wage, Carlos Santay-Carrillo always made sure he mailed some money home to Guatemala for his disabled father, his mother and his three younger siblings. For Mother's Day last year, he managed to send $100 and promised to get in touch by phone, a potentially crucial call because, at any moment, he was about to become a father for the first time. "I was there waiting for the call," said the mother, Maria Consuelo Carrillo de Santay. What she did not know, and would learn later to her horror, was that her 19-year-old son had been stabbed to death in a Catonsville gas station, minutes before he was to take his wife to a hospital to deliver their baby.

I was 8 years old when I first met Barbie, and I wanted a life just like hers. She had a boyfriend, Ken; a best friend, Midge; and a lot of clothes. From Barbie, I learned a sartorial approach to existence: You need only to have the right outfit, and the life to go with it will appear. Buy a poofy dress and you get a date for the prom; plan a trousseau and marriage will follow; buy the right suit and a career would materialize. But today, Barbie turns 50, and I don't think she's prepared.

The Gathering By Anne Enright Black Cat-Grove Press / 272 pages / $14 Anne Enright is part of a remarkable generation of Irish writers who have helped transform their country's literature as surely as globalization has transformed their nation's economy. In some ways, the process has been remarkably similar - an enthusiasm for and immersion in foreign influence carried home to make Ireland's insularity no more than a geographic fact, at last. Like her contemporaries John Banville and Colm Toibin, Enright has been frank about the influence of American writers - particularly Don DeLillo, in her case - on her work.

Late last fall, Dartmouth Medical School researchers reported in the journal Cancer that 100 percent of newly diagnosed breast cancer patients experienced at least some level of distress, and nearly half met the criteria for a significant psychiatric disorder such as major depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. Well, duh! Is it really news that a serious medical diagnosis can shake a person to the core? The only surprise, to me, is that a study like this is necessary. While some medical schools are adding classes in things such as how to deliver bad news, the medical establishment as a whole still isn't as good as it could be at helping people who go in a heartbeat from merely having a medical appointment to wondering how long they have to live.

Lil' JJ is wise (and successful) beyond his years. At the still-tender age of 16, the comedian has appeared on Showtime at the Apollo and The Tonight Show. He won BET's standup competition, Coming to the Stage, beating out performers three times his age. JJ is a big-screen vet, having been chosen by Queen Latifah to appear in her movie Beauty Shop - when he was 13. Now he has his own show, Nickelodeon's Just Jordan. And he has a deal with the network film studio to star in and executive-produce a feature based on his life.

He has stared at the black-and-white photo for hours - the folds in the flannel jersey, the play of shadow and light - and finally, the artist acts. He dips brush to palette, swabbing up colors. He swivels his head toward a canvas and pads, blocks and swirls. A sleeve comes to life, a big cheek, a navy-and-white cap, and finally it's Babe Ruth himself, gazing out in melancholy color, mighty arms finishing a home-run swing. Behold the work of Robert Florio, a 25-year-old man who lost use of his limbs 11 years ago and now spends much of his time with a paintbrush in his mouth, rendering images of motion and grace.

Keira McNeill has specific ideas about how to mother her two daughters - cloth diapers preferably - and specific problems, such as her struggle with postpartum depression. With 6-month-old Campbell and 2 1/2 -year-old Teaghan to handle, she finds it hard to go out looking for like-minded moms. So McNeill, who lives in Knightdale, N.C., has found support and advice on the Internet. Her blog, Mom on a Stick, documents her life as a mother. The name is meant to evoke her feeling that she's flying by the seat of her pants as a parent.

For months last year, 50-year-old Larry Davis threatened and stalked and hurt his ex-girlfriend, according to court paperwork and testimony. He would sit in a chair across from the woman's Baltimore County home, a place where he had hidden knives and drill bits behind wall pictures and in furniture before she had kicked him out. He would disable her security system and sneak inside. He would ignore stay-away orders from the court. He once beat her with his Latex-gloved fists, and he once cut a hole in her roof and tried to crawl into her attic, according to court records.

Everyone who moves here eventually hears the same refrain. I bet even the passengers on the Ark and the Dove, the first English settlers in what would become Maryland, heard it when they disembarked on the shores of the Chesapeake in 1634: "It used to be better." What is "it?" Well, just about everything - from the city when William Donald Schaefer was mayor to the Wellesley fudge cake that Hutzler's used to sell - that once was and no longer is. You quickly get used to this defining quality of life in these parts - this terminally nostalgic, hopeless devotion to the way things used to be. Yoknapatawpha County may have been where the past isn't even past, but even Faulkner's invention has nothing on us when it comes to not just looking backward but living there.

A few words for dad: I received a letter a while back. It might have been from your kid. Actually, I received a stack of letters - short essays, to be exact - written by 12th-graders participating in a Father of the Year essay contest sponsored by the National Center for Fathering. The topic: "What My Father Means To Me." I sat down intending to glance at a handful of the pieces, but before I knew it, I had read them all. They left me wondering about the men who inspired the words. One girl - maybe your daughter - wrote: "My father is my heart and I couldn't imagine my life without him. ... I never had to look for him because my Dad is always around.

On October 14, 2009, John A memorial service to celebrate John's life will be held at Catonsville Presbyterian Church at 11 A.M. on October 24th. In lieu of flowers memorial contributions in John's name may be made to the Catonsville Presbyterian Building Fund.

Three months shy of his 84th birthday, Gino Marchetti sees life as an all-out pass rush. Forget old age - he hurdles it as nimbly as he did all those blockers before sacking the quarterback. Marchetti walks up to three miles a day and bowls four times a week. In West Chester, Pa., where the former Baltimore Colts Hall of Famer lives, they're still buzzing about the 299 game Marchetti rolled a couple of years ago, one pin shy of a perfect score. This year, he took up painting - not with brush and palette, but with roller and paint tray.

Lee Kenny has always fancied himself an artist. It took an energy drink to get his creative aspirations off the ground. Two years ago, Kenny, a house painter from Pasadena, had plenty of work, a great girlfriend and a gratifyingly busy life. But a strange idea possessed him. He wanted to build a flying machine and see if he could get it in the air. "I had the design finished," says Kenny, who hoped to enter his creation in a mock aviation contest. "It would be shaped like a jet and have removable wings.

Charles S. Dutton is the sort of actor who elevates every production he joins, whether award-winning plays such as August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson" or inspirational sports movies such as "The Express." So it's not surprising that Dutton is the first thing MGM wanted the news media to see and hear in the 20-minute "sizzle reel" the studio put together to promote the remake of its 1980 hit "Fame." Once again, we're in the audition rooms of New York City's School of the Performing Arts.

A 22-year-old Baltimore man was sentenced Wednesday to life in prison plus 20 years for a January 2008 murder for which prosecutors were unable to establish a motive. Danny Battle of the 3400 block of Ramona Ave. was convicted by a city jury July 31 of first-degree murder and use of a handgun in the commission of a crime of violence in the Jan. 25, 2008, shooting death of Irvin Lawson, 32, in the 900 block of Pennsylvania Ave. Prosecutors said Battle approached Lawson and another person as they were walking to Lawson's apartment and opened fire, striking Lawson in the back of the head, chest and back.

I was thirtysomething when "thirtysomething" debuted on ABC in 1987. Considering ground-breaking television at the time, it was reality TV - for baby boomers, anyway - before there was reality TV. Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick wrote the story of two couples and their three single friends trapped in yuppiedom, pretending to be grown-ups, facing up to the compromises that daily batter the spirits of the idealistic college kids they still think they...

Rubin Sztajer left a German concentration camp alive, but he worries about surviving a government health care overhaul. "I've been sentenced to death before by the Nazis," said the 84-year-old from Timonium. "I don't want to be sentenced again." Seniors like Sztajer are fearful that government bureaucrats will block access to their medical care if President Barack Obama's plan becomes law. These concerns are being fed, in no small part, by an effective conservative assault on a relatively short provision that involves end-of-life counseling.

Darron "Moo Man" Goods - a 25-year-old Baltimore man convicted of drug conspiracy, witness tampering and murder - was sentenced to three consecutive life terms in federal prison Monday, despite the judge's questioning whether he actually killed a man and Goods' courtroom claims of ineffectual counsel. "No, no, that's not right," Goods' sister called out as the judge gave his ruling. "My brother didn't do that [expletive]." Goods was tried this spring alongside James "Miami" Dinkins and Melvin Gilbert, two "very dangerous individuals feared throughout the community," according to one of Goods' attorneys, Thomas J. Saunders.

Early in her training - during the first two weeks, in fact - Karen Greenfield got a lesson in flying she'd never forget. It was a sunny afternoon in late winter, 3,000 feet above rural Virginia. The wannabe pilot was at the controls, her hands nervously gripping the stick, as the instructor beside her coached her through a sharp swoop upward. "Bring the nose up," he said. But the rookie put in too much rudder. The two-seat Piper Cub jerked to one side, catapulted into a spin, and dropped toward the earth like a 1,500-pound "helicopter" leaf from a maple tree.

Calling it an "egregious crime," a city judge sentenced a Black Guerrilla Family member to life in prison for executing a learning-disabled recruit who didn't meet standards as a drug dealer. The victim, 18-year-old Derius Harmon, was shot in the eye two days after he joined the gang because he had made mistakes handling drug money. His body was dumped in a vacant house in the 2200 block of Barclay St., where it was found May 2, 2007. On Thursday, Judge John C. Themelis sentenced Bryant Williams, 25, of the 5400 block of Todd St., to the life term, plus 20 years for using a handgun in a violent crime, after describing the killing as "one of the most egregious crimes ... that I've heard in a very long time."