It turns out Kina’s a gardening freak, which has us all chuffed here at TDK HQ—a vociferously pro-gardening newsroom with absolutely no experience in the cultivation of actual plants. Yesterday, as a budding green thumb1, Kina spent nearly an hour wandering the rows of the Teaching Garden at Governor’s Island in solitude, periodically walking up to a volunteer to ask about a particular flower or get permission to water something. She learned about beetles and brussels sprouts and soap, and how to use one of those things to keep the other two apart. She tasted a perfectly-ripe August cherry tomato and did not find it to her liking—to the shock of the farmers. She poured water from a plastic whale over the marigold blossoms, until one of the farmers taught her that water droplets act at lenses in the summer sun and can burn the flowers. She then poured water from a plastic whale carefully and directly into the soil underneath the marigolds until they were sated. She plucked off leaves of geranium, thyme, and spearmint, crushing them between her fingers and holding them to her nose; she proposed that the geranium might repel mosquitoes and set off to find some to repel. She tapped squash. She marveled at corn. She sat with her parents on a red porch swing with exposed screws and rusty chains, rocking back and forth in the shade of the trees and watching the wasps as they pollinated the yarrow at the border of the garden. We only got her out of there by promising that we could visit anytime she wanted, and we walked through the gate with her as she looked back at her flowers and corn and thyme, a gentlewoman farmer to the last.

A delightful little minimalist entry for today’s Parade cover. It depicts a single marigold. Kina’s name sprouts from the bottom of the page like a little plant, and the sun shines from above. Viewed with a close eye, the canvas betrays a spoiled headline from a prior edition. It happens.

Kina has discovered climate change, and none too soon.

dad

Kina has always been pretty solitary and independent at playgrounds, caring little for the social machinery of the scooter set, but a year of near-constant playground attendance will inevitably build up a kid’s reputation, and Kina seems to believe she has finally arrived as the mayor of the neighborhood—the object of affections, peer and parental, from the moment she stepped out our front door. Never quite the hermit, Kina wasn’t flustered by the attention, settling into her swingset governance role with ease, calming babies, finding lost toys, and appeasing her varied fans. She gets her popularity gene from Laurea, I think—or at least her tendencies towards the gregarious; I was always more of a curious observer (which I’ve also seen in Kina, and admired) than a king of the slides, so it’s hard to know how exactly Kina will wield her power. Having known the kid for going on five years now, I’m mostly confident it will be fine; she’s a good egg.

If the playground needs an emperor, I say, let her be benevolent.

dad

I obviously wrote this morning’s top headline thinking I’d be able to write a whole think piece about parenting and current events this evening, and then I saw the news about the drowned New Yorkers and the explicit Supreme Court decision not to strike down the abortion ban in Texas and the kids getting sick in Alabama, and you know what? I just can’t.

Kina doesn’t know about any of it. I’ll let her hold onto that.

Since I do know about it, and so do you, I’m going to ask that you donate to every Texan abortion support organization that you can. That much we can do.

Once, while Laurea was working on an arduous month-long event, I spent an unusual amount of time alone with Kina during the week. As a special tradition during that month, Kina and I would stroll to the local coffee shop in the morning for a breakfast sandwich, singing “cheddar cheeeeese and baaaaacon” as she scooted down the sidewalk in her Hello Kitty helmet. We’d sit outside under an umbrella and share our sandwich as she drank her orange juice and I drank my coffee, looking at the bees and having little conversations. It is one of our favorite mutual memories, and when Kina brought it up this morning at breakfast, I thought back on that time as being so peaceful and unburdened, in the days before the pandemic, when Kina was so small.

Except it wasn’t before the pandemic. The event Laurea was working on was fully remote, and the coffee shop only had outdoor seating, and Kina was home with me because she didn’t have school. It was, in fact, only a year ago, which feels like ten years ago, which is impossible, because Kina is only four.

The weird thing about drawing this newspaper for as long as I have is that I now have a record of all the things that happen in eighteen months of a kid’s life. A very small fraction of those things, when you write them down on paper, will fill five archival boxes—far more space, you might think, than should be required for eighteen months of charming childhood recollections. My brain can’t conceive of that much life (and everything else that I have taken great pains not to write about in that same period) fitting into less than two years. It can’t conceive of how this pandemic could stretch on for so long, nor of how Kina might form, in that time, the kinds of long-term memories that you have to close your eyes to recall. It seems like it must be a long time ago, because eighteen months isn’t usually a long time in adult years. Turns out it is in kid years.

As I typed out this morning’s headline, it occurred to me that it reads as though Kina renamed her local playground, which would be completely on brand but is not the case. No, reader, this time it was the city of New York that looked at our local playground—with its exposed bolts, lumpy asphalt, and intermittent water feature—and said, “Let’s give this playground an abstract name that evokes an image of fruit!”

It seems pointless to rename a playground like this in a vacuum, so I expect some signage to go up in the next few months announcing the temporary closure of the Strawberry Playground for renovation, which would be great, except that the playground currently serves as a refuge for local multigenerational families who desperately need to get out of their apartments—regardless of how shiny the equipment is.

I’m not going to moan about a fancy playground, but I do find it curious that it’s taken so long to get one, and I wonder what prompted the city to plant a strawberry in the middle of Rodney Street today, rather than ten years ago.

See you soon, Lala! It was a good week, and Kina yelled at every plane we saw on our drive home from JFK.

dad

After a lifetime of broadcasting her every need to anybody who would listen, Kina has finally discovered the beauty and power of secrets. At first, like all of us once must have, she thought of secrets not as knowledge held in escrow, but as words quietly spoken. Walking around the house, she would move her lips in silence, giving very little voice to her own internal dialogue. Secrets, to her, were silences made visible.

The next phase to Kina’s understanding of secrets was proximity. A few weeks ago, Kina began to approach me and place her lips against my ear, silently articulating whatever was on her mind against the side of my head. In words so hushed as to be effectively inaudible, she laid out her stories and wishes for us in a pantomime of whispering. At this stage, secrets for her were simply desires that she carried closer to us so that we could better understand their value to her.

It wasn’t until about a week and a half ago, when I caught her looking out of the corner of her eye at me while telling a secret to Laurea, that I saw her understand something deeper and more mystical about secrets—their secrecy.

It is true that Laurea and I have been accused in the past of growing obsessed about topics about which we can never shut up, and no topic in this house has been as constant a focus for us as vaccines. I suspect we are not alone in this, but our persistence is notable, because it’s clearly become a talking point for our own four-year-old daughter. Lately, we’ve all (including Kina) been fixated on her first vaccine, which hovers somewhere out of reach near the middle of winter. Maybe talking about it is a sort of prayer for us as school grows near. Given the state of things out there, talking non-stop about vaccines may be the most rational thing we can do.

dad

Today’s edition was produced and edited by Lala. Many of the top headlines seem to be song fragments from “Do Your Ears Hang Low?” but at least half the edition is about dinner at Lighthouse, which all present—including the owners’ dog— apparently enjoyed.

dad

First time in over a year of sending these newsletters that I actually forgot to send on the proper night, so you, lucky reader, get two today—the first of which explores Kina’s fascinating diatribes about poopin’. Wish I had something more highbrow for you. More later!

dad

Slow news day here, as Kina galavants about privately with her Lala. Carousels, as it turns out, are not a public utility and sometimes stop spinning. Give me a little credit for my sweet Ned Flanders drawing. Okily dokily.

dad

Domino Park, the local fancy strip of green built by our local waterfront megadevelopers to satisfy the public space regulations put in place by New York City,1 includes a clever little installation of hoses and nozzles that, in summertime, emit water vapor and engulf a section of the waterfront in fog. When it’s hot outside, it’s arguably even better than fountains. Kina and her Lala floated through the ersatz clouds yesterday, tossing coins onto the decaying pilings in the well where the fog is born. They made wishes and stayed cool. Lala was indefatigable, despite having just flown through her own puffy clouds on a red-eye from California, and chased Kina through the park as if she were a teenager (which, in some ways, she still is). Later that evening, they both faded away, dewy and toasted out.

d

“When will Lala come here in an airplane?” Today, thanks to the god of weather and the aviation industry.

dad

I do actually get Laurea’s style, but I am continually astonished when strange new parcels arrive, bearing shiny silver boots or boxy frocks. For years, I was the guy who monochromatically color-matched all his pants and shirts, so the riot of color and angle that Laurea has brought to my life is a real side-benefit of this relationship we share. Kina, who has inherited Laurea’s style DNA, comes by this naturally, which means that the two of them can look down their noses at me whenever I don’t understand the subtle impact of some shoe or another.

I like being the baffled outsider sometimes—no expectations to meet, and it gives my daughter a meaningful skill to lord over me, which she would likely do anyway, but this way I can contain it to dresses.

What kind of New York-ass kid plays a game where you need to see a specialist for your imagined ailments on the street in front of an Italian restaurant? True heads know this child.

dad

For over a year, she’s been lip syncing to her favorite Disney musical numbers. It took a bluetooth microphone to unlock her voice, which now reverberates through every corner of our home. She takes after her parents, god help us.

dad

Kina, like all people under the age of 30, maintains a list in her head of all the people who matter to her, which makes her uncommonly well-prepared to accept an Academy Award or schedule a birthday party. She had me add at least three names to the cloud of people that surround her head in today’s newspaper. She is nothing if not thorough.

I am just happy to be nominated.

dad

Some days feel divorced, entirely, from the days that preceded them—where tomorrow and yesterday diverge so sharply that life loses its continuity: births, deaths, tragedies, fortune, arrayed like orthogonal planes in time. You never see those fractures coming, but you know in an instant that they have arrived, because you feel the gap that has opened up behind you, and you know that it can’t be crossed. For me, at least, these days have included: September 11th (on which the our role in the unfolding chaos in Afghanistan was built), the day of Trump’s election, Kina’s birth (not long after), and the lockdowns that shortly preceded the first edition of this newspaper. I’ve acclimated to all of these things, for better and for worse, but they’ve all left their subtle marks.

For the most part, I’m lucky to live the kind of life where my memories of yesterday can mostly inform my plans for tomorrow. Kina is also that sort of lucky, even if she gets her yesterdays and her tomorrows all mixed up. Wednesday is today and yesterday is Tuesday and tomorrow is Thursday, and so on and so on. I don’t know what it must be like to live in the kind of place in which you cannot assume that Thursday will come, let alone know if it will be bear any similarity to Wednesday. I sometimes close my eyes tight and hope, with real desperation, that Kina never has to feel that way. I sometimes feel complicit in how others do feel that way—this week, in particular.

What are we going to do yesterday? What could we have done differently? Would it have changed anything at all?

Somehow we forgot to tell Kina that there are buildings in which you can watch movies where the screen is as big as our whole apartment. Someday we’ll visit one with her, and it will blow her freaking mind.

dad