Open A Window

President-elect Barack Obama has stated that "literacy is the highway to success" and that libraries represent "a window to a larger world." Adviser David Axelrod recently said libraries will be part of the proposed economic stimulus package. As the nation and the world look to a new chapter in history, these statements leave me optimistic. During these tough economic times, library services across the nation are in great demand. Families are examining their budgets and turning to libraries more than ever.

RECENTLY I danced with a door. I was swinging and swaying with a hunk of wood, attempting to hang a door in my younger son's bedroom.The hinges of the door had become separated from the jamb or door frame. There were several reasons for the separation. The primary one was dunking. A small plastic basketball hoop, the kind that accepts small, soft basketballs, had been attached to the door.That meant that some not-so-small boys, my sons, 16 and 11, and their buddies, had been dunking, slamming the ball through the hoop.

WASHINGTON - One display case holds the remains of a 15-year-old Anne Arundel County boy, a servant who apparently was murdered and stuffed into a hole scooped out of a dirt cellar. Farther along are the bones of a strapping lad of 12 or 13, with evidence of a raging infection in his lower jaw. He was found in a hastily dug grave in Jamestown, Va., an Indian arrow in his thigh. Even more telling is a baby, born into the wealth and power of Maryland's first family and interred in a costly lead coffin in St. Mary's City.

DANDONG, China -- The gash on Ma Guanzheng's forehead is a small sign of the vast hunger gripping North Korea these days.A teen-ager struck Ma with a rock earlier this month as he was transporting flour across the border into North Korea. Ma said a crowd of teen-age boys leapt on his truck, cut through inch-thick ropes that held the flour on top and made off with 30 bags."If you stop, it's even worse," said Ma, 49, smoking a cigarette as he waited to cross the border again last week. "They will steal more."

While standing on the porch of his renovated yellow- and aqua-colored Victorian house in rural Shawsville, Danny Simpson says, "Observation comes natural to me." The diverse landscape that he observes includes a new Shell gas station across Route 23, still a country road. In the northern part of Harford County, Simpson stands on land that's part of the Piedmont Plateau. This fairly high elevation is flatter than the Blue Ridge foothills of his Martinsville, Va., hometown. Artist Simpson has made a home in Shawsville for the past 17 years, watching trees, fields, landscapes and streams on his daily jog. Now, he is putting seasonal and timeless images into original stained-glass pieces he sells from his studio and gallery at the rate of about one a month.

WASHINGTON - For the last 300 years, windows have reflected the ever-changing appearance and aspirations of the American home. The so-called "eyes" of a structure, windows have evolved from the small leaded glass casements of Puritan homes to the iconic walls of glass of the 1950s to a futuristic model equipped with a computer, video or television screen. The National Building Museum has mounted a major exhibition on the crucial role that windows have played in shaping U.S. architecture and domestic lifestyles.

People passing through the intersection at Charles and Centre streets recently may have noticed an intriguing banner hanging from the wall above the entrance to the Walters Art Museum . The oversize image depicts a black woman dressed in the manner of a 16 t h century Italian lady-in-waiting, who returns our gaze with an expression of ironic, amused self-awareness. Who is she? Alas, we don't know. The picture is based on a painting attributed to the Italian master Annibale Carracci, probably from the 1580s and possibly completed in Venice, where the artist is known to have traveled during those years and where objects such as the richly ornamented gilt tower clock the woman holds in one hand were common in the homes of that city's wealthy elite.

The teacher asked a group of Walters Art Museum spectators who were just old enough to shed baby teeth to explain what made the piazza in the Renaissance painting View of the Ideal City so perfect. "Nobody is shooting anybody else," said 9-year-old Alexanderia Williams, of Dallas F. Nicholas Elementary School in Baltimore's Charles Village. Such unusual - even disturbing - observations are what museum educators have come to expect from children taking part in a pilot literacy and arts program called Mummies, Manuscripts and Myths.

WASHINGTON -- For the occasion Fran Boyd of Baltimore wore a black suit peppered with silver specks and big, gold earrings and sat at the table marked RESERVED at the very front where she could see her own life on the theater-sized movie screen. It was an odd enough occasion yesterday afternoon, a publicity event for an HBO mini-series staged in a U.S. Senate hearing room and attended by members of Congress, by Kweisi Mfume, head of the NAACP, by drug policy people, show-biz people, reporters.

POLICE LOG* Harper's Choice: 10900 block of Rock Coast Road: Someone pried open a rear window and ransacked a home on Wednesday.