He plunged face-first down the icy chute with a laminated photograph of his grandfather inside his white helmet, a bittersweet reminder of the legacy he was racing for.

LEAD: For Senator Richard G. Lugar, the Persian Gulf crisis has brought a bittersweet reminder of what was and what might have been.

But Marbury's homecoming, they said, is also a bittersweet reminder of their own struggles to get out, of being stuck, of what could have been, of dreams left on the court.

Now, it was a bittersweet reminder, a kind of home.

John Lupton of Country Standard Time wrote "this is Hartford at his entertaining best, a bittersweet reminder of how much was lost to us when he passed away..."

"It's a parable, an allegory, a bittersweet reminder of the chaos of India," Zia Jaffrey wrote here last year.

Back then, the gift had delighted and touched Barrows, but as she looked at it now, it served only to wound her, a bittersweet reminder of what she had lost.

Black, threatening storm clouds hovered just above the choppy seas, a bittersweet reminder ... Ah, but if only Papa had been unjustly accused.

Not far from here, another event the other day offered a bittersweet reminder of earlier times.

In most Armenian homes in the modern diaspora, there are pictures of Mount Ararat, a bittersweet reminder of the homeland and national aspirations.