You want to see those napkins? Enjoy.

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Imagine being six, not yet a decade old, and knowing that something has been around longer than you’ve been alive. A decade is unfathomably long to her—the equivalent of eighty years for me. To me, a decade is a bit less than a fifth of my life. It doesn’t feel so far off today from 2013, when Obama was president and Lorde released “Royals”…. Maybe it does. Maybe it’s forever. Can you believe it?

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I would give anything to sleep so deeply that all your memories of your conscious life and family are knocked straight out of you, and you wake up to a world unfolding with mystery—like being born fresh every single morning.

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This whole edition is basically about an extremely rainy Saturday in Brooklyn and what you end up having to do about it, and realizing you know at least two other families in the same situation. At least we all got to talk, eventually.

It’s been a long time since I took the reins of the Parade, but here we are. The wax-resist watercolor pieces are 100% by Kina, but the giant PARAdE is by me.

Kina loves many things, but princesses and puzzles are both up there. Thanks to her teachers for letting her borrow this book.

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Laurea spent all morning teaching Kina radio etiquette just so we could walk to school saying “go for mommy” into our sleeves.

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The Book of Losers is a massive tome. Keep your noses clean, readers.

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I wrote a thing about not-best-friends last year that I still really like, because it explores the concept of a friend-for-the-moment—a kind of friend I really love and have come to accept that I’ve become accustomed to, having grown up in a lot of different places and built up countless ephemeral friendships. I don’t know what that says about me as a friend in general, or what it must be like to be my friend when your experience of friendship carries with the kind of commitment that requires ranking and competition. I have a few friendships I value tremendously, but I have no best friend, and I’m cool with that.

Is that somehow akin to this idea Kina has of “backup friends” at school—a designation she’s given to almost every friend she has had since kindergarten? Maybe; it feels like it. These friends all know slightly different Kinas, as my friends all know slightly different Davids. Those Davids are “backup Davids” in a way—the Davids at the edge of other people. Kina’s just taking the other view, that these people are all there to meet a different edge of her.

Kina has tremendous fun with all her backup friends, and they all rub different edges of her as they pass through. They are (as I wrote last year) the running friend, the new home friend, the shoes friend, the friend to talk to at lunch, the falling-down friend, the parkour friend. They move in and out of focus, pass by at school dropoff, walk through the gates with Kina—who is at equal ease with each of them as they stroll across the yard. Together, they make up her collective best friend, who was never missing to begin with.

It has, according to our esteemed publisher, been like this since the very first day of school. A vibrant bazaar, full of unreasonable bartering.

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We honestly had planned to take Kina to the movies long ago, but, you know, global pandemic.

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Yesterday, was, in fact, a fairly ordinary day, when measured against all the many days that I have lived. Gymnastics—check. Playground—check. Family time—check. Car nap—well, okay, some of it was unusual, but this falls into the category of Days We Have Known.

But for Kina, it was special. Her mother was back in town, she was able to visit the Japanese grocery in Industry City. While there, she was able to spend time with her whole New-York-based family, including her tiny cousin Otis. She did a flip. She took a nap.

I think back to when I was small, sometimes, and marvel at the myriad little sacraments that made up my otherwise normal life. Talking to robins in the trees, libraries with carpeted conversation pits, spaghetti and meatballs. Everything that was happening for me, in my life, was a secret joy. Secret, in that only I could feel and see and hear it for the first time—the robins, the soft carpet, the impossibly deep snow.

Mommy’s back after a long and rewarding week of work, and this delightful daddy-daughter week makes its gentle, satisfying exit.

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At the end of the day, I wasn’t really that suspicious at all.

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Kina stopped waking us up at night (again) several weeks ago, but she clearly hasn’t stopped waking herself up at night from time to time, as evidenced by her impromptu couch nest from this morning—allegedly assembled “halfway through sleeping”, as one does.

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When the cat (Mom) is away, the mice (Dad) will play (drop Kina off at the actual schoolyard, instead of at the opposite corner, and also stand and wave for two minutes as Kina backs away from him across the yard, gesticulating lovingly throughout).

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Kina, like many small children, tends to get a lot of scrapes and bruises in the course of navigating the world at top speed. I’ve grown accustomed to discovering abrasions when I give her a hug after school, or seeing a wine-red contusion on her shin after a day in the playground. In the moment, these injuries are naturally a giant drama, but the pain passes after a while and we move on.

This is a metaphor for life.

At Futura’s birthday party on Saturday, Kina took a spill while chasing after some boys, and another parent escorted her back to me with a concerned look and a full first-aid kit. Kina sobbed on my shoulder as I asked her to tell me where she’d gotten hurt, pointing at the most likely points of impact. Head? No. Knees? No. Stinky feet? No (chuckle, sob.) Elbow? Nodding head.

It is very important to me that I know how to do Kina’s hair. This concern dates back to July 5, 2020, when haircuts were not viable and all of us looked like Zoom neanderthals, and I got to watching lots of videos about curly hair, which Kina has in spades. From this particular pandemic research rabbit hole, I eventually came to realize that the smooth move for little kids with type-2B hair is to pull that mess together into some braids. And as a man who really, really wants to show up for the women in his life, I decided to be braid dad.

Let me tell you, other dads: This is not as easy as it sounds.

I have spent, intermittently, much of the last three years experimenting with brushing, pulling, gathering, wrapping, pinning, and—yes—braiding Kina’s hair, with very limited success. It has been humbling. Hairs out of place, loose and wobbly braids, poorly-placed ponytails—I have run the gamut of follicular abuse, and I have strived to be better. For that, I turn to my role models.

I’ve been thinking a lot about who we’ve become, which is connected somewhat to the question of who we have been. Some of that—without spending too much time diving into this—is how money has undermined our hard-wired intrinsic reward systems about giving gifts. The idea that pre-economic, post-monkey humans were somehow exchanging finite supplies of beaver pelts for finite supplies of literally everything else a single human being needs to survive seems inefficient at best; these societies have to have been built on the foundation of communal sufficiency, contribution, and gratitude. We’re not out here running around feeling a primal sense of joy when we pick out gifts or see them sitting under a tree for nothing. We are hard-wired to show up for each other and keep each other alive.

That’s the monkey.

What I worry about, instead, is what replaces that monkey: A zero-sum game of power and control that leverages scarcity for influence, that incentivizes hoarding, that creates myths about superiority and rifts in culture. The people out there who claim that life is nasty, brutish, and short—who preach the cult of the alpha wolf and prep to be the last ones standing on Earth or the first ones standing on Mars—are telling us a story about the market-based past that is self-fulfilling. Money, the abstract container of value, which can’t feed any of us or keep us warm, is driving our evolution to our worst possible selves.

Laurea’s on the road—Kina’s Event Parent—and we get a little solo time together here at TDKHQ for the next week. We would have celebrated with cupcakes, but the store that Kina spotted the cupcakes in was actually a soap store. Who’s out here bathing with cupcakes? This neighborhood.

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I mean, we are all equally baffled by the size of her feet. It is a collective puzzlement.

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