More from "Timing"

The tradition of my mother sketching newborn babies went back to my birth. I was the youngest child of four, born seven years after my sister Callie. The afternoon I
was born, my father brought my two older brothers and my sister to the hospital
with him, but back then, they wouldn't let children in to visit. My father and siblings all stood on the grass below my mother's room and called up to her. Family legend has it that she made a sketch of me. She fashioned it into a paper airplane, which she flew down to my brothers and sister so they could see what I looked like. Now every time one of her children has a baby, she comes to the hospital to sketch. She was still busy drawing an unknown something forty minutes later, when I finally heard from Mike.