A Child Of Atom

When I was sketching this image the baby was initially asleep, but a big lurch of the train woke him and he started to cry. A woman to my left that I hadn't noticed was watching me started whispering across the aisle to the mother, telling her that I was doing a "nice drawing" of her child and that she should try to calm him so that I could finish. I guess my benefactor figured that I couldn't hear her because I had my iPod playing. The mother ignored her, as well as the crying baby. I shifted the focus of my sketch to details of the stroller, and other things, waiting for the child to settle down again. In a few seconds he miraculously calmed, but was turned in a different direction, staring intently at my benefactor. I looked up from my sketch to see what she had done to capture the baby's imagination so intensely. There, in the middle of the D train, this woman had reached into her purse and pulled out a parakeet. She sat there with this small green bird on her finger, stroking it's wings, and holding it out for the baby to watch. After a few minutes she gently ushered the bird back into her bag, and the now pacified baby settled back into a fairly close approximation of his original position. I finished the sketch, but would have loved to have sketched the woman with her bird.