I don’t have a big long essay to write about Kina and Futura’s annual trip to Governor’s Island, but I will note that the intervening year has made them significantly more independent and capable of climbing large and boulderous mountains without the assistance or permission of adults. They enjoyed themselves (and the multiple desserts they managed to connive us into buying for them) immensely.

Kina wasted no time in assembling today’s Parade, going so far as to produce our first landscape cover—which will make it difficult to blow in, but we will leave that to the press plant—and draw the masthead herself. The drawing, apparently, has something to do with a train of hearts. It is nice!

Kina is clearly not one of those children whose parents proudly post Instagram stories about how advanced their child’s memory processing and spatial awareness are. This is not to say that she is somehow deficient in her memory or spatial awareness, but maybe that she just pays a lot more attention to cats than she pays to her own fragile sense of patience.

Also, she wants you to know that cats are just little lions.

dad

Tall Kina will have her day.

dad

It’s a little hard to explain to a child that your job doesn’t look like anything in particular, and requires no particular tool. I can’t pantomime being in engineering management, as hard as I think about it. My job, if we’re being super honest, looks mostly like me hunched over a desk, staring at a screen full of rectangles and saying as little as absolutely necessary.

Late-stage capitalism makes for unfulfilling demonstrations of what it means to be a productive member of society, as it turns out, and it’s not entirely something that I care to model for my kid. I just want Kina’s answer to this same question someday to be a little more demonstrable and connected to the world around her in ways that she herself can understand.

I’m not saying that I want Kina to turn bowls for a living1 or become a steelworker2, but I do want her to feel a sense, in her job, of specific purpose and contribution that she can watch evolve, day by day. What that job might be, in twenty years, is both inscrutable and slightly frightening from this vantage point, but I’m hoping that we play our cards right in the near term (ahem Congress3) to retain some semblance of civilization in which there are still hammers to be swung—because I see Kina, in her essence, as a swinger of hammers. In that essence, I haven’t yet figured out if she’s tearing something down or building it up, but I’m confident she’ll have something to show for the work, either way.

I just realized how many crowns these kids make as part of their kindergarten curriculum.

dad

Our little daredevil had an incident in the hula hoop zone and skinned her elbow, which seems like a good cause for an introduction to the school nurse. It is also a good reason for Kina to have her very first normal phone call with her mother—an experience it seems like she would normally have had at least two years ago? Kina didn’t even realize it was Laurea—she thought it was her teacher. Why her teacher would have hopped on the phone to the school nurse is a mystery locked forever in Kina’s mind.

Anyhow, she’s totally fine.

Don’t worry.

The earliest video evidence I have of Kina in a swing is from July 20th, 2017. In the video in question, taken at our beloved Rodney (now “Strawberry”) Playground, a seven month old child—clearly too small for the little bucket swing in which she was sitting—rocks gently back and forth, hanging her arms over the front of the swing. It is my arm in the video, pushing her. She was very light.

A few months later, from almost exactly four years ago, another video: Kina, still small, laughing wildly as we push her to a reasonably normal height. She was still tiny enough that we had to stuff the swing with blankets to keep her from bonking her head. Laurea pushes her in this video.

In March of 2018, Kina was old enough to know how to hold the bars on the swing, and how to control her upper body in the swing so as not to be whipped wildly around as the swing went higher. Laurea pushes.

We are, genetically, a speedy little family. Laurea has always been a fast walker, and I spent more or less my entire childhood running wherever it was I had to go—whether or not it was permissible. Kina has mostly taken after us both, and is known by various neighborhood parents and caregivers as “the running girl”. Walking, for Kina, is a way for her to mock other, slower people. Running, to her, is how legs work.

I am forty-seven years old, though, having become one of those slower people now, and ill at ease with conventional exercise rituals; I have taken a trust-and-follow approach to walking with Kina, who can usually be found a full city block ahead of me on our strolls, as I plod dutifully after her. I usually manage to keep up with Laurea, at least, but a recent switch in my mid-pandemic footwear led to an unexpected bout of achy calves and a somewhat more predictable bout of whiny me.

This helps to explain how I could be seen slouching yesterday towards the local playground in a dismal third place, waving desperately to the rest of my light-footed nuclear family as they scampered into the distance. “Slow your roll!” I shouted after them in vain, perplexing the strangers who flowed around me like water around a stuck log.

Our anxieties about our children’s sense of abandonment is nothing but a shoddy proxy for our own. I would have stood there all day, hand raised over my head, waiting for her to turn around, just to give her every opportunity not to forget about me.

She noticed me! I survive another day!

dad

It is unclear whether Kina is actually far more popular among her classmates than I ever was, or if she simply believes that she is universally adored. Regardless, she is four, and she loves the kids at her school; let her be loved, or believe that she is loved—the benefit, to her (and us), is all the same.

dad

Dominoes without rules is just minimalist collage. Fight me.

dad

Once upon a time, a little girl met a bird sitting on a branch, minding its own business and eating some seeds, and the little girl asked the bird how she could find her friends, who had wandered off. The bird told her a story:

“Once upon a time, a little girl met a bird sitting on a branch, minding its own business and eating some seeds, and the little girl asked the bird how she could find her friends, who had wandered off. The bird told her a story:

‘Once upon a time, a little girl met a bird sitting on a branch, minding its own business and eating some seeds, and the little girl asked the bird how she could find her friends, who had wandered off. The bird told her a story:

It was May 21st, apparently, but feels like years ago, as with everything else.

dad

I don’t have a whole novel to write about Kina-as-perpetual-motion-machine, but she told me this morning that she “had energy with Kelli,” which seemed like a reasonably good hook for a headline, and now I’m wondering why I didn’t just write that instead of making weird generator references.

Anyway, it was late this morning when I wrote the paper, and so I drew the masthead myself—a simple red KINA as almost an afterthought—but it freaked her out that I didn’t ask her to draw a masthead (or “a middle”, as she calls it) of her own, and she demanded that I paste over it. I like hers better anyhow.

dad

Because Kina urged us, this morning, not to fast forward to the inevitable beginning of the work/school week (which, it should be noted, is a holiday from scholarly responsibility for her), we spent the day dwelling on family, the rain, and Kina’s grown-up friend Kelli—who brought us bagels and rugelach in the park, where the weather (as noted) vacillated between aggressive fog and passive-aggressive drizzle.

It can be handy to have a roommate who reliably reminds you not to get ahead of yourself with worry on a gray Sunday, who collects just the right wizard hat to impress your friends, who will run into somebody’s home to hug them when they just aren’t feeling up to lunch outside, who counts among her most kindred spirits of the day:

1. a small, excitable, and newly-met wooly dog named Brooks

2. her grown-up friend Kelli

3. a cousin, not yet counted among us, who is nonetheless making their presence known

Birthday parties have gotten far more adventurous today than when I was a kid, and now that Kina has eaten of the tree of extreme playspace knowledge, we are destined forever to harness her to various bridges and vertiginous walls whenever the spirit strikes her. Laurea could scarcely convince her to leave the hangar last night.

In this, she is very like I was as a child, when I would dream of vast treehouses connected by water slides. Who wouldn’t want to live out their days in the treetops, harnessed safely to a branch and celebrating a continuous flow of birthdays and with friends, eating pizza?

It’s a life.

This is your periodic reminder that I put Kina to bed every night by pretending to be a storytelling bird who perches on the edge of her bed and pulls brand new stories out of his imaginary satchel to lull her to sleep.

They all have funny endings.

dad

Kina longs to have silken braided tresses, like Elsa’s, that tumble down her back. She dreams of complex braid patterns that merge into each other like Celtic knots. She imagines, probably, that they will be blonde. We’ll see.

She’s been asking to grow it out, so it’s been two years since she had a really significant trim, and her hair still barely falls below her chin. I’ve talked about her curly hair before, and while I made the assessment last year that Kina was a 2B girl, I am now convinced that she’s made the leap to 2C, which Allure tells me is quintessentially Shakira hair, and she may get still curlier—the more Kina’s hair grows, the more twisty it gets, desperate at all costs to avoid her shoulders.

This is why I have kept my own hair so short for the last twenty years. Absent careful tending, my head will inevitably and slowly come to resemble a furry mushroom. The first time my parents picked me up from college, I hadn’t had a haircut in three months, and I had to turn sideways to get out of my dorm.

The one thing I did not remember about Pippi Longstocking from my encounters with her story as a kid was her giant suitcase full of cash and how casually the story treats her mysterious fortune. (“Pippi Longstocking is also rich”, says the narrator offhandedly.) Who is this horse-lifting billionaire, and who’s tracking her tax liabilities?!

dad

“Parabola” really is a hilarious word if you set aside all the memories of homework and calculators. She laughed about it, I kid you not, for thirty straight minutes this morning.

Also, can I tell you something? I really almost made Kina’s little poetic turn of phrase about my damp hands the top headline today, but I did not want people to think badly of me for not drying my hands like a person who has been alive for over four decades.

Being the assistant home page editor does have its privileges.

That feeling when you are a brutal winner, but you also really love your mommy.

dad

Kina was not quite two years old the last time we went to Storm King—a sprawling Hudson Valley estate whose grounds are peppered with the kinds of massive outdoor sculptures that only seem to fit on sprawling Hudson Valley estates. At the time, she was roughly two feet tall. Mark DiSuvero’s Frog Legs, positioned at the top of a hill at the entrance of the museum, is, by contrast, roughly twenty-seven feet tall. Back then, before the pandemic, potty training, and much of her capacity for speech, she paid it little mind.

I have a theory, informed by this observation, that we tend to ignore things that are thirteen times larger than ourselves. Seven story buildings, for example, are not particularly interesting to the average adult. Small children take school buses for granted. Rats pay us little mind. Somewhere between my height and fifty times my height, I cease to care.

Casual observations of Kina’s interest in outdoor sculpture suggests that her interest can in fact be piqued by objects and earthworks that are at least twenty-five times her size, including DiSuvero’s E=MC21, which Kina called “the big sword” when we revisited Storm King yesterday for the first time in three years. It crept to her attention as we tooled around the campus together on a rented tag-along bike—a normal grown-up bike towing the back half of a smaller kid’s bike. We had, when we visited the little rental shack by the parking lot, asked for a bike with a kid’s seat, but Storm King is apparently too sophisticated for babies, and the attendant shot us the uniquely and unconvincingly disappointed look of a salesperson who is about to offer you the opportunity of a lifetime. She brought out this centaur of a bicycle, a liminal being, like a polyp growing out of a coral reef, and Kina was absolutely sold.

Kina is a consummate organizer, a frank critic, and very much the image of her mother.

dad

I can’t tell you a single thing that Kina learned yesterday, or who her favorite classmate is, or whether she played on the playground or not, but I can one hundred percent guarantee that I will know within seconds of her arrival home exactly what it is that she ate for lunch. That’s enough of a miracle, when viewed against the larger backdrop of what we don’t know about the universe, that I can sleep well at night.

dad

It is all very confusing, on a Wednesday, to find oneself incapable of expressing exactly how far away Saturday is. There is no time with Right Now vibes quite as strong as a Wednesday, and to see Kina reckoning with that realization so early in her life is humbling. You have plenty of Wednesdays left, little girl, and the weekend will always be the day after the day after the day after the day after yesterday. You’ll get there soon enough.

dad

The newsroom is fairly sure that tomorrow’s substitute teacher will be neither Ms. Donna, who teaches a whole other classroom, nor Ms. Olenick, who either works at a new school or is living on the roof, depending on which of us you ask.

dad

I dunno—you heard it here first.

dad

When babies turn one, a birthday party is essentially an excuse to drink and commiserate about lost sleep. Babies have no friends, which leads parents to believe that their child’s birthday parties will always be fun chat times to hang out with cool adults they already know.

When a baby turns two, they can be entertained, and so a parent may feel pressured to provide entertainment. A singalong might be convened, which makes fun chat times difficult, but is amusing enough to distract a parent from the fact that the party is not, this year, about them. It is also possible, and reasonable, not to hire entertainment, in which case you will mostly hear bored babies crying.

At three, a toddler absolutely requires entertainment. The singalong is now required, and the kids are fully mobile. Children will collide, which prompts crying, but they also have a reliable sense of what cake is, which stops the crying. Parents do not talk much at the third birthday, because they are pursuing three year olds to prevent collisions.

A few weeks back, we planned a secret trip to a pumpkin patch with Kina’s friend Niki, a friend who has spent more or less his whole life with Kina, and who moved out east during the pandemic. Despite this untimely move, we try to stay in touch and take periodic trips east and west across the glacial moraine of Long Island, traversing beaches and hills formed eons ago by the slow procession of ice in order to keep two very recently-born children familiar with each other.

And what geologic formation could be more notable and child-friendly at this time of year than an authentic pumpkin patch? What a vision I had—of twisted vines and varied gourds, of parents carrying hacksaws, of upturned earth. How poetic! I have never actually seen a pumpkin patch, and so my most relevant point of reference is It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, whose hero, Linus, is famous for his solemn recitation of the film’s core plot premise:

Each year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere. He's gotta pick this one. He's got to. I don't see how a pumpkin patch can be more sincere than this one. You can look around and there's not a sign of hypocrisy. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.

I don’t understand this berry hostility, but Kina is a full-on mango fiend these days, and maybe the traditional fruits of her parents’ generation just don’t cut it anymore. Alternately, I could be misreading her use of the term “basic”, and four year olds are just trafficking in different slang. Either way, new generation thinks strawberries are basic; deal with it.

dad

It feels somehow very Brooklyn for our kid to be really into a foundational Sanskrit epic before she is five, but I am not bragging.

dad

Listen, the dream is cool and all, and there’s a lot to be said for everybody in the family having their very own cake, and what if the whole world had the same birthday? But can I tell you one thing? You haven’t lived until you’ve heard Kina totally losing it over Grover running back and forth screaming “neaaaaar!!!! faaaaaar!!!!!”

I guess what I’m saying here is that I’m proud of my Grover.

dad

A couple months back, Kina’s friend Niki gave her a little three-minute sand timer he got at the dentist as a gift, which she left at the bottom of a bucket in her bedroom until yesterday, when she brought it out to measure her entire day. Whatever she was doing, or whoever she was talking to, if she saw the sand had run its course, she’d stop to turn it over before continuing. This proceeded until she went to bed, when she pulled out a stool and upturned the timer on it as I finished telling her a bedtime story.

Three minutes later, she didn’t call us back.

dad

When I got home today, Kina asked me if I did “safety drills” when I was as small as she is. The way she asked suggested there was more to safety than just leaving the building in an orderly fashion, and so I told her that I had learned about fires and tornadoes when I was young, and that I had never had to escape either a fire or a tornado, but it was good to learn how to, just in case. What I didn’t tell her was that there are so many more things that kids have to learn to protect themselves from now, and that it would not surprise me if it took all day to practice them all. God willing, she never has to escape from those things either, but good to spend all day on it, just in case.

dad

Our friend Ada and her little brother Julian cajoled their mother into driving to Williamsburg yesterday to see Ari the Singalong Guy—Kina’s favorite local children’s performer—and eat free cookies. Having enjoyed the performance and consumed the free cookies, the three kids decamped to the big playground nearby and encountered yet another of Kina’s park acquaintances, a little girl named Adele. Together, they all scooted around like old friends and glommed onto still more children, including a little boy whose grandfather was quietly reading him stories from Highlights magazine. The girls sat on the bench next to them and hovered uncomfortably close, eating pizza. I eventually offered the boy a slice just to make it less weird.

Childhood friendships are so easy! They appear to be based mostly on two kids being of similar heights and the shared availability of scooters, lacking all the senseless drama of adult friendships. That five kids who basically didn’t know each other three hours prior could end up all eating ice cream together in the middle of the afternoon feels like a miracle of human behavior to me, and it reminds me how much I owe my actual adult friends a call.

Give me a holler if you want to hang out and scoot, friends.

Yesterday morning, as we were making our way through Soho, we caught a glimpse of the San Gennaro festival on Mulberry Street, to Kina’s evident glee. Loyal readers will recall that Kina is a staunch supporter of all Italian saints feasts—most notably what Williamsburg folks call “the Giglio”, where Kina is a minor celebrity. So for the rest of the day, then, following her discovery of the existence of the San Gennaro feast, she pestered us to make our way back, to which we consented.

Later in the day, after returning home from various playgrounds, Kina immediately went to her room to select her costume—a sparkly blue wizard outfit, complete with pointy hat. She wore that outfit for the next several hours, on the train, as we walked down Mulberry (in which the presence of her pointy hat kept her from being trampled), on my shoulders down the rest of Mulberry (during which several thousand attendees swooned in amazement), on the unusually rickety ferris wheel, and on the stoop of the building where we ate our sausage and peppers.

The feast was busy. The outfit was a total hit. The sausage was okay. We were happy.

New York City’s public schools serve roughly a million kids two daily free meals. Every child in these schools walks up to the same counter every day and receives their lunch, regardless of need and without any indication of their capacity to pay. This program is profoundly beneficial in integrated schools like Kina’s, where over half the students live in poverty and would otherwise need to either volunteer their need or forgo meals out of necessity or shame.

Kina is fortunate that she can have Cheerios whenever she wants, but I am glad she and her classmates get them every morning in the classroom, together, for free. I am also glad she told us about this program herself, because I knew nothing about it, and it really explains why she hasn’t been eating all her breakfast at home since she started school and re-discovered Cheerios.

Once again, public schools demonstrate the power of socialist programs to protect the most vulnerable among us by providing for all of us; don’t take it for granted.

Unlike her father, Kina is particularly enamored of this cartoon retelling of the sudden obliteration of nearly all life on Earth. I don’t usually find mass extinction to be an uplifting start to the day, but it seems to have made an impact on Kina1. Not sure how she arrived at the conclusion that grouchy knees took down the non-avian dinosaurs, but I assume it has something to do with me, and I take mild offense.

dad

Such a power move. Your name is Finn.

dad

It’s definitely harder to gather headlines for the paper this week, as school dominates the news and Kina jealously guards her personal experiences. At least she’s bringing crafts home, which I took great pains to reproduce for you, dear reader—down to the ice cream sundae sticker on the spiky bit of the crown. I’m obsessed.

dad

Laurea insisted on drawing me standing with my face pressed against the fence as Kina waited to walk into school on her first day. I am pleased to inform you that I was only 40% as embarrassing at her second drop-off of the year.

dad

Vignettes from this morning’s first day of school:

1. She dons her new backpack and claims, “It fits me perfectly!”

2. She decorates her new shiny silver shoes with rainbow and unicorn stickers, muttering that her teacher “will love the hearts”.

3. She strikes a power pose, unprompted, at the front door of our building, waiting for me to take her photo.

4. Two blocks away, as we approach school, a line of children and their parents wraps around an entire city block; we are fortunate that Kina is in kindergarten and has a separate line and entrance, which is also slammed.

5. The health form website is down; I fill out a paper form, which has exactly four checkboxes on it and is made of paper, which never goes down.

6. Other parents from yesterday’s meetup are present; we greet them like fellow chauffeurs in a crowded parking lot, looking out over the crowd for our passengers.

7. People are desperate to rid themselves of any obligations to which they have no genetic relation; envelopes of money, rolls of paper towels, and boxes of tissue are handed to random teachers.

8. In the rush, I forget my traditional goodbye of “high five, fist bump, big hug” and just squeeze Kina close as people shuffle around us on the sidewalk; wanting to enter the building, she wriggles ferociously.

9. Parents are lined up along the wrought iron fence, watching as their children calmly meet their teachers and calling out like groupies; I join them and stare quietly at Kina as she clutches an unopened box of tissues and waits her turn.

10. I think about the first day of school, two years ago, when all the children wept as the parents slowly walked out of the classroom.

11. Today is very different.

    dad

I’m not sure what prompted Kina’s little observation about the past this morning, but it seemed timely and was extremely on brand. What happens today, what we try today, is all we have. The past, for example, is the last eighteen months of haphazard school in our living room. Today, by contrast, is the day we met eight kids from Kina’s new classroom on the playground and packed her backpack for the first day of school. We will not concern ourselves with tomorrow any more than we will the past. That’s what the newspaper is for.

Speaking of which, there remains a huge question hanging in the air in our household about the future of this paper, whose daily publication has relied heavily on not having to get out of the house by 8:15 every single morning. We will strive to keep the presses running, but things might get sloppy. I trust you all will understand.

Eternal best friends are reunited after a long summer of vacations. I know I’ve written a lot about kids coming home lately, but these reunions mean a lot to Kina now, and I want her to remember this summer, and how much she missed—and loved—her friends.

dad

I love it when the newsletter text is shorter than the headline. To the gup!

dad

There are many things I expected Kina to look forward to, but math was not one of them. Having her family in space is a sort of family-wide goal, so I’m somewhat less surprised to see that in the list.

Tomorrow we practice our school day routine. Pray for us.

dad

This last week, with Kina, in the last breath of summer, as all the other kids slowly return to the playgrounds from various long vacations and houses away from here, has me thinking about Samuel Barber’s setting, for voice and orchestra, of James Agee’s prose poem, Knoxville: Summer of 1915. This has long been one of my favorite pieces of vocal music, and it has its season; I always—and only—turn to it at the end of summer, when, as Agee writes, “Supper was at six and was over by half past. There was still daylight, shining softly and with a tarnish, like the lining of a shell.” The full prose poem is longer than the text that Barber set to music, which I will include here so that it can live in your head, as it does in mine. I suggest you listen to Dawn Upshaw’s recording of the song as you read it, if you like to cry.

dad

A selfie was contemplated, but the Congresswoman was dining with friends, and Kina’s parents decided that a newspaper would be a sufficient memorial of the moment she sat within yelling distance of one of the few public servants we have today who are unabashedly giving voice to the work government needs to be doing in order to make a just and viable planet for the publisher of this esteemed little daily: Decarbonize the economy, provide for health care and housing as human rights, advance justice for cis women and transgender folks, pass laws to dismantle legislatively-enshrined white supremacy, and reform campaign finance laws to unlock the initiative in our representatives to make it all happen.

All that and a bowl of noodles. Someday Kina will meet AOC again, and she can ask for a picture herself.

dad

I don’t want to paint the Bronx Zoo with too broad a brush, but trying to find the tigers, in the midst of a global pandemic, with a child on your shoulders who is wielding an umbrella against the pouring rain—perhaps not the ideal zoo experience. At the end of it, the tigers, who were sheltering from the rain, had the right idea (if, tragically, no umbrellas).

dad

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.