Inexplicably, I have no photos of the first time Kina met her classmates at the turtle fountain in McCarren Park, but I did manage to discover a short piece in the September 12, 2021 issue that covered the affair:

Now she’s buds with all those opaque shadow children! They fill water balloons together and make mischief! They have all now become school chums, and I have become a class dad who knows the other class dads, and I realize now that I will spend the next several years of my life in New York City watching these kids grow up and being friends with the class dads.

Hey, are you curious what the top headline of the day was on September 12, 2021?

“We Don’t Talk About the Past In This Family”

with a dek that read:

“We only talk about what we are gonna do today”

I am taking that counsel to heart, reader.

I cannot recall when it was that our Parade covers pivoted to rainbows and flowers, or rainbow flowers (growing here in a lawn of rainbow grass), but here we are again. It is, honestly, a really beautiful series, and someday there will be a gallery show of all of them, and Kina will be flirting with the gallery assistant or something, and I will be standing there with a glass of cheap white wine, just glowing with pride and being super weird.

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