The other day, we were all sitting around and watching videos of a much younger Kina, laughing at her squeaky little voice as she wore headphones and stomped around our apartment dragging a tiny wooden wagon full of blankets, threatening to go to the seashore because I wasn't listening to her.
That video is from April 9, 2020. Kina was three years old, and The Daily Kina—the newspaper you are reading right now—was six days old. Today, she is eight, and this esteemed publication is exactly five years old. If I am correct that I have not missed a single day, then there are one thousand eight hundred and twenty-six (1,826) editions of this periodical expression of one child's life sitting in several archival boxes on a shelf in her room.
Looking through those boxes would show you a change so gradual that you'd barely notice how much Kina was changing. A day is still a day, and one to the next is much the same, on paper as in life. But give it an hour or so—at a minute per issue, say—and you'd see Kina getting more curious, learning to read, trying to express herself, making sense of time. You'd notice me as I stopped calling her “toddler”, as I drew her a bit taller (and with real limbs), as her participation in the tradition of drawing a Sunday Parade tapered off, and then again as she started drawing and writing some of these pages herself. By the time you reached today's edition, some thirty hours later, you'd feel like you watched Kina grow up, but even then you just barely did. You missed the tantrums and the sleeping and the goofy laugh and all the things I forgot to write down and the way she still holds my hand when she crosses the street. I sometimes turn to the paper to figure out when something happened; sometimes it's in the boxes, often it's not. There's so much here. You missed so much.
Every time I get to an anniversary like this, I worry about what would happen if there were a fire in our apartment, and then I file the paper away, because the paper isn't the point. I look back now and realize that writing about Kina every day during the pandemic was a ritual of protection—telling a little bit of her story morning by morning to keep the demons away from her. They say no news is good news, but this was the good news—and I hope it's been good news for you. I've said it often enough in the past, but it bears repeating: I was protecting myself and Laurea, too. We were watching another story evolve every day back then, and it was not nearly as comfortable as this one. We all had this story, our little Scheherazade.
And here we are at the onset of another global crisis, talking about the quotidian life of that same little kid we're all trying to protect, except she's a little older and taller and just on the cusp of awareness of the thing we're here specifically not to talk about. I've thought about this a lot, though, and I have very intentionally not been writing here about the horrors of the world today, in part because we have decided not to bring that into her life. What you see here is what she brings to us every day.
Soon enough, I'm afraid, she will bring the world to us, and we'll be ready for it. I think.
I don't know what The Daily Kina will look like in another five years. I've given myself the option to stop every year, but neither Kina nor I have yet seen any point in stopping. I thought I'd have to quit at a hundred issues—at a year—when she started kindergarten—at a thousand; and here I am, still. If I were a betting man, though, I would guess that I won't still be drawing The Daily Kina in 2030. Kina will be thirteen, and I think we can all agree that no thirteen-year-old in history has ever been thrilled to have her life catalogued in this way. It is, as they say, “cringe”.1
Knowing Kina, and watching her grow into a curious, sensitive, sharp big kid, it's easy to say this: The person she'll be at thirteen will likely look back on these five years and eighteen hundred pieces of paper with some fondness. We've been thumbing through the old issues lately, and she chuckles at the bad drawings and the overwrought surveys of bedtime stories. She may not feel it now, but future Kina should know, reading these, that I was listening. That has been a gift for both of us.
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I just asked Kina if she thought she'd want me to still be doing this when she's thirteen, and she replied, “You should do it as long as you want to. It's your choice.” We'll see about that, pal. ↩