Our Publisher Is 7!

Today is the fourth birthday installment of The Daily Kina, and the seventh birthday installment of Kina. I was looking at pictures today of Kina from her birthday in 2020, when she was still so small and we were still so isolated. Among the pictures is a video of her doing her daily Zoom with her pre-Kindergarten classmates. She shows them her balloons and you can hear the voices of other children, tinny over the laptop speaker, talking about how shiny the balloons are. Her teacher asks everybody who is already four to put up four fingers. Kina looks calmly at the screen, because she is big now.

There was a lot of Zoom when Kina was four. Her birthday party, like everybody else’s, was conducted by video—balloons in the background, a kid’s singer appearing from in front of the fireplace in her house, cake with a candle, impatient children on their parents’ laps, not knowing any better because so few of them could remember any birthday at all that wasn’t conducted over Zoom.

It was a special birthday, because it felt like a moment of joy in the midst of a lonely year. We would celebrate Christmas alone that year—just the three of us, like we were the last people on earth. Kina’s birthday in 2020 felt like two adults welcoming a junior colleague into a secret society, a dose of adulthood and a slice of cake.

This year, instead, she celebrated with her classmates in an actual classroom. Her teacher gave her some Model Magic clay and she had pizza with Sloane. Yesterday, we took her to her very first opera—a milestone for me, because singing opera is what I expected to be doing for a living, and it’s been years since I was in touch with that part of myself. Three years after a birthday in our living room, we watched the chandeliers go up over the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera, and we sat side by side, so that Kina could whisper questions to me like: “When will we meet Tamino’s girlfriend?” and “Are those actual boys? Just painted white?” and “Will the Queen of the Night marry that guy?”

We ate dim sum and pasta with Ken. We went to the playground. She ate some chocolate. It was a chill day.

This morning, I made her pancakes—on a school day, no less. She opened her present on the couch and we sang her “Happy Birthday” in the living room.

It felt like coming home.

Happy Birthday to our publisher. May she live long and get many balloons.

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