Bella Boyd, Allison Arkland and Kamryn Pruismann listen as author Timothy Bailey reads from his new book, “I?Miss You.”?Bailey read to the children at a story time on Thursday morning. He will speak at an author’s event on Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Kendall Young Library.

A touching telephone call from a young friend who lived halfway across the country was what inspired Timothy Bailey, a Webster City native, to write a children’s book entitled, “I Miss You.” The idea came from the child of a friend who lived in Colorado. “We became the best of friends. They would come over, and I would visit them,” he said. Shortly after Bailey moved from Colorado to Illinois in 2006, he received a phone call from one of his young friends “She called my house in Illinois. I think she was four at the time,” he said. “She was home sick, and called and said, ‘I miss you. Can I come over to your house?’” She didn’t realize that hundreds of miles separated her from Bailey. So that phone conversation developed into a poem that eventually developed into the book. “I kind of started to write it all out, make it rhyme, and make it fun. I wrote it just to mail to them,” he said. He later decided to turn the work into a book.