Memories

WILLIAMSPORT, PA. / / Williamsport makes national and international news once a year -- when the Little League World Series is played here in August. But it's unfortunate that this north-central Pennsylvania city gets forgotten almost as quickly as the last Little Leaguer rounds the bases at Howard J. Lamade Stadium. That's just wrong, because Williamsport is too rich a place to leave unexplored. I know, because I've spent some of the happiest times of my life there. In fact, Williamsport is more like my home than my hometown.

WE'RE ALL INVITED to a grand celebration at Westminster City Park on Sept. 11.Softball games, basketball games, music, picnic food, a moon bounce, a Velcro wall and lots of other wholesome fun are planned.For the second consecutive year, the Christian-outreach organization Circle of Friends is pulling together a memorial concert and an evening of fun. Celebration of Life will be a time for grieving families, especially youths, to find comfort in community support and to share memories with people who care, said Patti Robinson, who co-founded the group with her sister-in-law Janai Bassler.

The pond trail at Charlestown has patches of snow marked with webbed feet, patches of chickweed resolutely green -- and lots of puddles. This March afternoon tells a familiar tale of spring's bumpy transitions: a long moment of blue warmth followed by a gust of frigid wind. It's as if the weather is determined to stir up memories of other Marches, other thoughts streaked with the ironies of spring.Walking, you hear Carolina wrens and mourning doves, but also the wind chimes of those who live in the apartments on the ridge above the pond.

150 years ago in The Sun July 4: THE FOURTH OF JULY -- This day, another anniversary of national independence, recurs to the memories and the hearts of the people; to the memories of but an honorable few, now rapidly passing away; to the hearts, it is to be hoped, of all.The worthies of the revolution are now becoming few and far between upon the earth, and in a few more years at most, the last link between the early strife and quivering hope of the past...

With every holiday ornament, another memory came rushing back -- the funny, silly and even disastrous family times we've shared on the road.That's because wherever we take the kids, I try to buy each child an ornament to remember the trip, marking it with their name and the year. Sometimes, they pick their own.A few weeks ago, for example, Reggie spent more than an hour in a Colonial Williamsburg shop agonizing between an 18th-century woman and a Revolutionary-era house before XTC making her all-important choice.

BECAUSE MY formative years coincided with the 1950s, I consider myself a child of the television age. Yet it is the still pictures held up to me as icons, rather than the flickering images on the tube, that remain most vividly etched in my memory.I was reminded of this paradox by the Baltimore Museum of Art's exhibition of Laurie Simmons' photographs, which opened last week.Simmons' work constitutes a kind of surreal commentary on the visual culture of the 1950s, which she re-creates with biting satire, humor and uncanny insight through the use of dolls, toys and other miniature figures as props.

On the day after Thanksgiving, after finishing some errands on Charles Street below Mount Vernon Square, I suddenly decided to take a walk through what used to be the heart of downtown Baltimore: Howard Street.Of course, Howard Street is all boarded up or mostly empty now: The old Oriole Cafeteria, the great department stores that ruled the shopping life of Baltimoreans, the specialty shops and marble-floored banks -- they exist only in memory.Walking along Howard, I thought about how in December the downtown streets used to be filled with Christmas shoppers and Salvation Army Santas and boys who sold brown-paper shopping bags for a nickel.

Some mothers make photo albums. Others record family memories on video. Patricia McEntire of Hickory Ridge village keeps the memories of her two sons close to her in the form of dolls.For Christmas in 1992, Mrs. McEntire decided to make each son a 9-foot-long garland with fabric dolls that would remind them of the things they had done as children and as a family.Now, Mrs. McEntire tells the stories of other people's lives through her dolls.It has turned into a full-time job. Five days a week, the 53-year-old Columbia resident begins working at 5:15 a.m. and sometimes doesn't finish until 8 or 9 p.m. She hand-stitches each 6-inch doll with clothes, paints each face and carefully chooses props to accentuate that doll's personality.

Sunset lovers are connoisseurs of nature's great performances -- fans of the big finish. A few years ago, some people were watching a majestic late-summer sunset from Federal Hill. At the finish, one of the spectators yelled, "That was a 10!"Great sunsets have a way of burning into memory, of separating, by degrees of light, life's good moments from the bad or just ordinary ones.Some people have a sense of sunset, a spiritual instinct that instructs them where and when to look. "Dusks seem to reach into me and pull me away from whatever I may be thinking or worrying about," says Tom Casciero, who works at Towson State University and relishes sunsets from a hilltop there.

Howard Swift stands in what used to be his bedroom, staring at the hole in the ceiling where his attic -- and the boxes filled with his family's memories -- came crashing down during last week's natural gas explosion in Westminster."

Every time summer comes around, I think about my childhood, when I was fortunate enough to wake up every morning with nothing to do. I didn't have to attend any camps or enrichment programs, sign up for arts and crafts courses, or go on any scheduled nature hikes. Instead, I sat on my front steps with my next-door neighbor and asked her what she wanted to do, to which she would reply: "I don't know, what do you want to do?" We could usually come up with something. One time, we spent a whole day stocking our start-up perfume-making business, snapping the largest buds off my dad's prized rosebushes and putting them in sandwich bags filled with hose water.

Lora Nelle Cohill Visit www.schoedinger.com to share memories or express condolences.

Even though Connolly's Pier 5 Pratt Street seafood house served up its last crab cake platter in 1991, Baltimoreans near and far still fondly recall the old, no-frills restaurant and wish that such a place still existed. In the week since my Connolly's column was published, my phone has rung off the hook, and my e-mail basket went into meltdown. Folks anxious to talk about the loss of the rattletrap seafood venue that defied the march of time and Inner Harbor development were more than willing to share a few memories of long-ago meals there.

As I watched Everyman Theatre's production of The Turn of the Screw, I couldn't help thinking about the infamous McMartin Preschool case and the way that the most well-intentioned, pure-hearted adults can instill false - and immensely damaging - memories into susceptible children. The McMartin case involved the six-year prosecution of the proprietors of a California day-care center in the 1980s, and focused on allegations of Satanic rituals and the sexual abuse of young children. No convictions were obtained, and one of the alleged victims later recanted his testimony.

Raymond Berry hasn't caught a pass for the Baltimore Colts in 40 years. But, to this day, when he travels the country, people approach him to talk about the perfect routes he ran on Sunday afternoons at Memorial Stadium. If they don't come in person, they write letters, sharing memories their fathers and grandfathers passed down about Berry and John Unitas and Lenny Moore. Tom Matte still lives in town, so he gets it even more. What was it like, people want to know, replacing Unitas in a pinch, having to read the plays off a wristband during the 1965 stretch run?

WILLIAMSPORT, PA. / / Williamsport makes national and international news once a year -- when the Little League World Series is played here in August. But it's unfortunate that this north-central Pennsylvania city gets forgotten almost as quickly as the last Little Leaguer rounds the bases at Howard J. Lamade Stadium. That's just wrong, because Williamsport is too rich a place to leave unexplored. I know, because I've spent some of the happiest times of my life there. In fact, Williamsport is more like my home than my hometown.

The reminders are everywhere. In the locker room. On the practice field. Around town. Everywhere the Denver Broncos go, they see reminders of Darrent Williams, the cornerback who was killed senselessly when thugs riddled his limousine with bullets after a New Year's Eve party. Javon Walker, the star receiver who cradled Williams' head as he took his final breaths, wears a mohawk in his friend's honor. John Lynch carries memories of Williams in his heart because of the way the 24-year-old treated his children.

Scientists have found evidence that people can suppress disturbing memories by choosing not to think about them, a finding that could lead to improved therapies for post-traumatic stress, whose sufferers are haunted by scary memories they can't control. By scanning the brains of 16 healthy adults who had been shown gruesome photographs, researchers from the University of Colorado discovered subjects' memory circuits slowed when they were instructed to push mental images of the photos from their minds.

ALL OF US HAVE an old country. Even those whose families have been in this country since the 18th century. For me, the old country is called Darlington, a county seat in the South Carolina low country, the flat land that extends inland from the Atlantic coast. I grew up 300 miles away in Atlanta, where my parents moved after World War II. Darlington was the destination of countless family trips, daylong affairs with packed lunches over two-lane roads in pre-interstate and pre-McDonald's days.

The Orioles are off today, so I'm hoping to get up to Dodgertown for a walk down memory lane. The Dodgers have been training in Vero Beach for 60 years, but they will move out of the historic facility after next spring and join the Chicago White Sox in a new state-of-the-art facility in Arizona. I spent my first spring there in 1981, an eventful year that started with Fernandomania, was interrupted by a 50-day players' strike and ended with the Dodgers winning the World Series. It was the first and only team I covered as a beat writer that won a world championship.