In This Family, Sisterly Love Comes Special Delivery

--Carole Jalbert, 39, of Beverly, Mass., shows a very special concern for her sister’s pregnancy. “I always say we are due, not she is due. I will be in (the) delivery room. I will be there as her coach. When the baby is born, it will be given to me.” Jalbert’s sister, Sherry King, 35, is helping her sterile sister start a family and was inseminated with her brother-in-law’s sperm. “I never thought of it as my baby,” King, who has a 3-year-old daughter, said. “It was always my sister’s baby.” “Sometimes Sherry and I just look at each other and cry,” Jalbert said, “but they are tears of joy.” The sisters said they were not particularly close before the surrogate experience. “Ever since we started our family project, as we call it, to say we are close is an understatement,” King said. The family has decided to have King’s daughter present in the Malden Hospital delivery room, just in case the surrogate mother has trouble giving up the infant after birth, which is expected any day now. “How can you plan your emotions?” King asked.

--Mayor Barbara Boggs Sigmund of Princeton, N.J., calls it “an unlovable object.” And there are but few of us who have never bemoaned feeding those slender, ticking coin-eaters otherwise known as the parking meter. But Princeton turned out en masse to celebrate the meter’s 50th anniversary, with a parade, songs, poems and awards for the cleverest excuses for failing to feed its 1,100 machines. John Jackson, chief of city parking operations, said meters bring in $1 million annually in the college community. They require a lot of “tender, loving care,” he said. The Borough Council also celebrated a $17,000 windfall in overdue parking tickets paid under an amnesty program that began a month ago and ended this weekend. The winner of the most implausible excuse for not feeding a meter was Oscar Bascara, who said: “How could one trust a meter that has been around for so many years? They’re senile. You expect them to keep time?”

--Ten years and 13,000 miles later, Harry Rutstein of Seattle has finally returned home. He didn’t exactly take a slow boat to China. What he did, however, was retrace Marco Polo’s 13th-Century journey to China. “I feel that my soul is only alive when I’m traveling,” Rutstein said. He started from Venice in 1975 but had to break it off in Pakistan for financial and political reasons. He took off again in 1981, replenished with fresh supplies and money from his nonprofit Marco Polo Foundation. Rutstein is a vegetarian but said his first meal in China was a freshly killed mutton liver and sheep tail fat sandwich. “I wanted to fit in,” he said.