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.