Offspring

IT WAS 5 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving. The fog was thick, the rain was pouring, and I was driving up Reisterstown Road, headed toward Owings Mills Mall, wondering why I wasn't still in bed.To paraphrase one especially cogent writer, Christmas was at my throat once again. My No. 1 grandson, my beloved Kaine, had seen a commercial for a talking Pokemon doll called "I Choose You Pikachu." His mother, now my formerly beloved daughter Jennifer, passed the news on to my wife, who informed me. I responded with my usual passion regarding Christmas gift-giving.

The appropriate horse won the biggest race on the second-biggest day of racing in Maryland. His name: Perfect to a Tee.The 7-year-old gelding captured the $200,000 Maryland Million Classic yesterday at Laurel Park, holding off the dramatic late charge of Steak Scam, a gelding 2 years younger.Perfect to a Tee's trainer, rising star Linda Albert, said afterward that she worried early in the race that her horse, running snug against the rail, might become stuck inside traffic. But when Perfect to a Tee reached the final turn of the 1 3/16-mile race, his jockey Alcibiades Cortez swung the favorite to the outside and into the clear.

By the time children hit sixth grade, they should probably be seen and heard, but must they be spied on? Never has privacy been a bigger issue for parents of middle schoolers. From instant messaging on the Internet to private cell phones, preteens have more ways than ever to keep Mom and Dad out of the loop. And parents have seemingly never been more intent on monitoring their offspring -- and they've got the computer software and old-fashioned snoopiness to do it. "I want to know everything they're doing and then I don't," says Carla Bohannan, an Annapolis mother of three whose youngest, Emily, is 11 years old. "As baby boomers, I know the things we did without our parents knowing.

The phone book — an old friend, a fixture in the home — is in trouble. Verizon is seeking permission to make delivery optional for the residential white pages, what almost everyone calls the phone book. If the Public Service Commission grants the company's request, the thick tomes of residential listings won't be delivered to Baltimore area homes next year unless the customers request them. This news is being greeted by phone book detractors — those who search for numbers online or with their smart phones — as an inevitable march of progress.

As gas fumes force it out of its underground home, it scurries -- disoriented -- through overgrown grass. But before it can make a break for freedom, the shovel comes down and WHAM!Baltimore's growing rat population is minus one renegade rodent.But it is a mere dent in what seems to Stephanie A. Brooks an infinite number of pests. Brooks directs the city's Rat Rubout Program. She says the 50 to 100 rat complaints that come in each day -- many from previously rat-free neighborhoods -- and reports from the field indicate the rat population has swelled this summer.

When a great horse goes down, everyone seems to come together, funneling toward a greater good and higher purpose. We rush to fix this beautiful and broken sport with our megaphones, our picket signs and our finger-pointing. So it was no surprise that when Eight Belles was put down, just moments after crossing the Kentucky Derby finish line, the list of culprits couldn't grow fast enough. Overbreeding, track surfaces, drugs. But most curious of all was the finger pointed at another racehorse, one that died 41 years ago. How could this be?

"Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok," edited by Rodger Streitmatter. Free Press. 336 pages. $25.Before you get upset about an Eleanor Roosevelt scandal thrust in your face - who needs another scandal? - I suggest looking at "Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters of Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok" in the following light.This correspondence invites us to compare Mrs. Roosevelt to the ancient Greeks. The Greek elders' relations with their male proteges were, in many ways, an outgrowth of their lofty social position.

After a year of great sickness and little food, the Pilgrims who had settled in New England were rescued by a good harvest in the fall of 1621. Fifty-two English settlers celebrated the harvest with more than 90 of their Wampanoag Indian neighbors. In later years, the feast would be called the new country's first Thanksgiving, even though the Pilgrims did not have a regular Thanksgiving themselves. Today, their colony in Plymouth, Mass., is commemorated with Plimoth Plantation, a re-creation of the original settlement as it would have been in 1627.

WYE MILLS -- Many mighty oaks have grown from little acorns dropped by Maryland's Wye Oak during its 450-year life span, but state foresters have begun a difficult grafting process they hope will produce the tree's first genetically pure offspring.As a small group of guests watched from the ground Friday, a forester some 60 feet overhead in a bucket carefully cut several handfuls of new limb growth, the initial step in what could be a 20-year process to develop a clone of the historic tree.

BOSTON -- A few years ago a client came to Michael H. Davis, a Florida financial planner. The client's mother had become ill and could no longer manage her financial affairs, so a court had made the son her legal guardian. Since then, the son had found a few bank books around her house. A thorough search turned up more, a lot more."The woman had over 20 different bank accounts," Mr. Davis recalls. "She had bank books in her car, in her dresser drawers, even under the mattress." The son wrote letters to every financial institution in the area, asking if they had any records of his mother.