It’s Chapter Two in Ami’s Miracle Storybook of Life

A child no one expected would be alive at birth celebrated her second birthday with cards, flowers, gifts and phone calls from around the nation. Two years ago, Billy and Tami Zilembo, of Framingham, Mass., were at a hospital where Tami was to undergo surgery for removal of a stillborn infant. The baby was 27 days overdue, and doctors and nurses had been unable to detect vital signs on two monitoring machines. But the couple’s grief turned to joy during the Caesarean section when Dr. Gerald Cohen pulled out the 7-pound, 7-ounce girl, who began to cry. “Dr. Cohen said, ‘Oh, my God. We have life,’ ” Billy Zilembo, 32, recalled. Tami Zilembo, who was conscious during the procedure because she had wanted to hold her stillborn child, recalled: “I said to my husband, ‘Is that our baby?’ And he said, ‘You bet your life, sweetheart.’ I gave her all kinds of kisses. We were both crying. Everybody was crying, the doctors, the nurses, people in the hallway.” The couple named the infant Ami.

--Joseph Capizzano said he couldn’t figure out why his brother woke him up just to tell him the mail had come. But the letter with the unusual stamp turned out to be from a fisherman in the Azores who had found a message the brothers had put in a bottle and tossed into the water from a cruise ship off the coast of North Carolina three years ago. “I had forgotten about it,” 16-year-old Joseph, of Kenilworth, N.J., said. The letter was signed by Manuel Martins de Mell, who wrote in broken English that he found the bottle July 4 while “taking fish” in the Azores, a group of Portuguese islands in the North Atlantic about 3,000 miles from North Carolina. Joseph and his brother, Michael, have sent a letter to the fisherman inquiring about him and his life.

--A teacher is giving himself a geography lesson from a heavenly vantage point this summer--flying along the borders of the continental United States in a homemade, lightweight plane. John Faulkner, who teaches fine arts at the Choate prep school in Wallingford, Conn., has flown down the Atlantic Coast, along the Mexican border and up the California coast to San Francisco since June 19. He flies in 600-mile stretches--with 18 stops so far--in a 650-pound plane made of plastic foam, fiberglass and epoxy inscribed “Edges of America Project.” He plans to head north to Seattle before flying homeward along the Canadian border and south through New England.

--Nancy Wilson, lead guitarist and singer for the rock group Heart, was to marry rock critic Cameron Crowe at a private ceremony Sunday in Seattle, said Wilson’s manager, Trudy Green. The group’s latest album, “Heart,” was nominated for a Grammy this year. Crowe is the author of “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” which was turned into a movie in 1982.