Rebirth

Part movement, part poetry, part song, part private reverie and part shared experience, Denise A. Gantt's "meditations/from the ash" is a thoughtful evocation of love, loss and the trials of being a black single mother.Receiving its theatrical premiere at the Theatre Project, this 1997 Artscape playwriting award winner occasionally falls victim to overly precious writing ("the more I become like the desert/the less I become like grains of sand," is one example).Several elements, however, keep the piece involving.

After being stalled for months, redevelopment of the long-vacant Hutzler's building -- a key component of Towson's economic rebirth -- is moving forward, with the signing of a Barnes & Noble book and music store.The two-level, 30,400-square-foot bookstore is the first retail tenant of Towson Circle, the name the developer has given to the old department store at the busy corner of York and Joppa roads.The restoration, by Towson-based Heritage Properties Inc. and Cordish Co. of Baltimore, coincides with a $4.3 million county-state project to spruce up Towson's sidewalks with brickwork, lamp posts and planters, and to ease traffic congestion along the busy corridor with a roundabout.

Hillendale remains largely the same, even though a new generation of homeowners is finding it the perfect place for pleasant neighbors, excellent schools and access to public transportation, recreation and shopping.In the mid-1950s, Hillendale was considered the outer suburbs, even though it was just over the city line. When the Hillendale Country Club closed, 748 brick rowhouses went up in its place, beckoning middle-class families who wanted a two- or three-bedroom brick house along open streets where residents had larger front and back yards than were possible in city rowhousing.

Again this year, Jews and Christians share a weekend of holy days. Passover's celebration of liberation, the escape of the Jews from slavery in Egypt, and Easter's martyred savior risen from the grave are timeless reminders that stories of enslavement and death can indeed culminate in a joyous belief in miracles.But if the themes of Passover and Easter are timeless, they are observed each year by people all too wrapped up in the worrisome details that fill the hours, days and years. In these times, the hurry and bustle of life seem ever more dominating, ever more capable of pushing aside not just the small pleasures of life but also the time to contemplate its larger mysteries.

"Drinking the Rain: [a memoir]," by Alix Kates Shulman. 242 pages. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $20Henry Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately. Alix Kates Shulman went to an island to write a book. But in the course of her stay, the natural world so engaged her that she lost the urge to write, or for that matter, to do anything but live deliberately. Ten years later, she tells us where she lived and what she lived for.It's a great American tradition, going back to nature, testing the soul against the soil.

You could see it everywhere this week. On sidewalks, in schools, in offices, malls and grocery stores, people old and young had a fresh bounce in their step. Faces too long cast warily downward were instead blooming with smiles, even for strangers. Gone were the heavy winter coats, like a burden cast aside. Marylanders were basking in a verity as old as the world and as fresh as this Easter morning: However deep the chill, winter eventually gives way to the miracle of spring.In other winters, the first signs of spring somehow seemed inevitable.

A Vermont winter is always long, but especially this year's snowy record-breaker. And then . . . spring bursts upon the scene. In a flash, literally, life returns. It is noisy, glorious, raucous. We and our neighbors are transformed. As I contemplate the late April sunrise, I think I can move mountains!Such rebirth seldom occurs in corporations.Checkout clerks face another umpteen customers today (and then tomorrow), claims adjusters another raft of problems, chambermaids another passel of fetid hotel rooms.

Though Easter is usually celebrated in the United States with an endless stream of chocolate bunnies and jelly beans, there are many other traditions associated with the holiday. The feast that celebrates Christ's return to life after His crucifixion and death has many ancient antecedents.Greek and Roman festivals that celebrated the passage of winter into the rebirth of spring have common points with Easter as well as Passover, the Jewish feast celebrating the passage of the Hebrews out of Egypt.

Yes, at last, spring is here. No denying the burst of forsythias, the explosion of yellow and white daffodils.What better way to celebrate the rebirth of spring and the coming of summer than with the creation of an outdoor space from which to enjoy the seasons' blessings? The possibilities are endless: from pools to hot tubs to gazebos to gardens. All you need is a dream and the determination to make it come true.

In her blighted neighborhood, marooned between the remade Inner Harbor and the booming suburb of Towson, Gwendolyn Williams used to believe it was just a matter of time before prosperity seeped into the boarded-up homes and empty lots of the Oliver area.But now, when people talk of Baltimore's renaissance, the executive director of the Oliver Community Association wonders: What renaissance?After nearly two years of cutbacks in the public schools' budget, business failures and a rising crime rate, the mother of two sometimes contemplates abandoning Oliver, a neighborhood that adjoins the Green Mount Cemetery.

In the closing seconds of Morgan State's upset victory over Maryland this season, everyone at Comcast Center - including both coaches - knew Reggie Holmes was going to have the basketball in his hands. Maryland fans feared the prospect of it happening, and Greivis Vasquez, defending Holmes, pounded the floor to ready himself. And yet even with that burden of great expectations, Holmes smoothly pump-faked after catching a pass outside the three-point line, grinned as Vasquez flew by him, then made his fifth three-pointer to give Morgan State its biggest win in school history.

To learn more about attending the "Baltimore '68 Riots and Rebirth" conference at the University of Baltimore, go to www.ubalt.edu/baltimore68 or call 410-837-4079. If you are interested in providing an oral history of your experiences from April 1968, call 410-837-5296.

I wanted nothing but music. Every year for Christmas, Mama outdid herself, buying just about everything on the "wish lists" my two sisters and I put together immediately after Thanksgiving. Although Mama bought me clothes, board games, Hot Wheels and other things, I only cared about the records. All the other stuff was pushed aside as I tore the plastic off the new LPs. Now as a grown single man with no kids, Christmas has lost that magical glow. I don't expect gifts, and I only buy for a few close friends and relatives.

In moving the Browns in 1995, owner Art Modell delivered a Super Bowl championship to Baltimore and left his football demons in Cleveland. The heartache of "The Drive" and "The Fumble" has been replaced by an even more cursed existence in Cleveland since the Browns' rebirth. Ravens@Browns Sunday, 4:05 p.m., Ch. 13, 97.9 FM, 1090 AM Line: Ravens by 6 1/

The cast and the crew of the television series The Wire and Associated Black Charities host a concert to benefit victims of Hurricane Katrina tonight. Performers include New Or leans bands the subdudes, the Rebirth Brass Band and The Iguanas. The concert will take place at Sonar, 407 E. Saratoga St. Doors open at 6 p.m. Tickets are $50. Call 410-537-6567.

I REALLY need more space. But until I get a bigger place, I need to figure out a way to organize the thousands of CDs and growing number of music DVDs that dominate my living room. But the avalanching stacks haven't stopped me from bringing more discs home every week. The industry is trying to help me out, though, by putting the audio and the visual on one disc. In the mail last week, I received two DualDiscs: Rebirth, the new set by Jennifer Lopez, and Kind of Blue, one of my all-time favorite albums by Miles Davis.

CASCADE - When the Army cleared out of Fort Ritchie in 1998, local officials envisioned a high-tech business park springing up in its place and restoring hundreds of well-paying jobs to these remote mountains in Western Maryland. But six years later, the former base looks much as it did when the soldiers left: a ghost town of darkened buildings, rutted roads and drooping weeds. To be sure, base closures are never tidy. Environmental ills, complex regulations and quarrels among developers, local officials and the military often combine to stall their rebirth.

The winds of change are carrying the prospect of a true renaissance to the former blue- collar bastion of Dundalk, complete with the community's first gated housing development - the Lakes at Stansbury Shores. Private developers are working on two projects. The larger one, Stansbury Shores, is headed by John H. Riehl IV, principal of Obrecht-Riehl Properties of Baltimore. He is crafting a blueprint for an upscale development with up to 50 homes, along with condominiums, a small midrise building for seniors and boat slips off Bear Creek.

Italian shoes, espresso chocolate tortes and candles scented to smell like falling leaves. They, among other posh pieces of merchandise, are there for the taking at the city's Belvedere Square marketplace. But hardly anybody's taking. Six months after a grand opening at which Baltimore and business leaders extolled the rebirth of the once-deserted shopping center, Belvedere Square isn't living up to the financial and political hopes staked on its success, and some are worried. Among them is Mayor Martin O'Malley, one of the most ardent proponents of reviving the square, who sent out a letter recently to every resident within walking distance of the shopping center and pleaded with them to buy some of the items languishing on shelves.

After being stalled for months, redevelopment of the long-vacant Hutzler's building -- a key component of Towson's economic rebirth -- is moving forward, with the signing of a Barnes & Noble book and music store.The two-level, 30,400-square-foot bookstore is the first retail tenant of Towson Circle, the name the developer has given to the old department store at the busy corner of York and Joppa roads.The restoration, by Towson-based Heritage Properties Inc. and Cordish Co. of Baltimore, coincides with a $4.3 million county-state project to spruce up Towson's sidewalks with brickwork, lamp posts and planters, and to ease traffic congestion along the busy corridor with a roundabout.