When the cat (Mom) is away, the mice (Dad) will play (drop Kina off at the actual schoolyard, instead of at the opposite corner, and also stand and wave for two minutes as Kina backs away from him across the yard, gesticulating lovingly throughout).

dad

Kina, like many small children, tends to get a lot of scrapes and bruises in the course of navigating the world at top speed. I’ve grown accustomed to discovering abrasions when I give her a hug after school, or seeing a wine-red contusion on her shin after a day in the playground. In the moment, these injuries are naturally a giant drama, but the pain passes after a while and we move on.

This is a metaphor for life.

At Futura’s birthday party on Saturday, Kina took a spill while chasing after some boys, and another parent escorted her back to me with a concerned look and a full first-aid kit. Kina sobbed on my shoulder as I asked her to tell me where she’d gotten hurt, pointing at the most likely points of impact. Head? No. Knees? No. Stinky feet? No (chuckle, sob.) Elbow? Nodding head.

It is very important to me that I know how to do Kina’s hair. This concern dates back to July 5, 2020, when haircuts were not viable and all of us looked like Zoom neanderthals, and I got to watching lots of videos about curly hair, which Kina has in spades. From this particular pandemic research rabbit hole, I eventually came to realize that the smooth move for little kids with type-2B hair is to pull that mess together into some braids. And as a man who really, really wants to show up for the women in his life, I decided to be braid dad.

Let me tell you, other dads: This is not as easy as it sounds.

I have spent, intermittently, much of the last three years experimenting with brushing, pulling, gathering, wrapping, pinning, and—yes—braiding Kina’s hair, with very limited success. It has been humbling. Hairs out of place, loose and wobbly braids, poorly-placed ponytails—I have run the gamut of follicular abuse, and I have strived to be better. For that, I turn to my role models.

I’ve been thinking a lot about who we’ve become, which is connected somewhat to the question of who we have been. Some of that—without spending too much time diving into this—is how money has undermined our hard-wired intrinsic reward systems about giving gifts. The idea that pre-economic, post-monkey humans were somehow exchanging finite supplies of beaver pelts for finite supplies of literally everything else a single human being needs to survive seems inefficient at best; these societies have to have been built on the foundation of communal sufficiency, contribution, and gratitude. We’re not out here running around feeling a primal sense of joy when we pick out gifts or see them sitting under a tree for nothing. We are hard-wired to show up for each other and keep each other alive.

That’s the monkey.

What I worry about, instead, is what replaces that monkey: A zero-sum game of power and control that leverages scarcity for influence, that incentivizes hoarding, that creates myths about superiority and rifts in culture. The people out there who claim that life is nasty, brutish, and short—who preach the cult of the alpha wolf and prep to be the last ones standing on Earth or the first ones standing on Mars—are telling us a story about the market-based past that is self-fulfilling. Money, the abstract container of value, which can’t feed any of us or keep us warm, is driving our evolution to our worst possible selves.

Laurea’s on the road—Kina’s Event Parent—and we get a little solo time together here at TDKHQ for the next week. We would have celebrated with cupcakes, but the store that Kina spotted the cupcakes in was actually a soap store. Who’s out here bathing with cupcakes? This neighborhood.

dad

I mean, we are all equally baffled by the size of her feet. It is a collective puzzlement.

dad

It was 90 degrees in Brooklyn today, and while the scuttlebutt on the playground was that the water-spurting turtles were on, they were dry as a bone by the time Kina arrived at the scene. A climate reminder: It is not yet halfway through April.

For a little more context on the turtles, and the equity of water features in New York City, a couple prior editions for you to peruse on your fire escapes, or with your face firmly planted in front of a dusty box fan in the window:

Purple is compassion, or calm. Red is mad. Green is happy.

dad

We never plan for spring break in this house, so it’s fake school all week here at the Daily Kina.

dad

Being six means being the kind of person who actually questions whether or not the sky is quite as empty as we believe it to be.

dad

We had expected more of a huntable egg hunt than what the Isle of Governors laid out for Kina and a few hundred of her closest five-to-eight-year-old friends yesterday. Instead, a field strewn with gaily-painted wooden eggs was penned in by yellow nylon twine, sheltered from the hungry pawing of the massed crowd. A lone person in a creepy easter bunny outfit roamed the edges of the field, like a monarch before their troops, urging them into greater frenzies.

As the hour of the battle neared, the children pressed in against the rope inch by inch, until a few pink eggs slid into arms’ reach; the marauders swept them up in silence while the referees were otherwise distracted. “Take three big steps backwards,” said one of the adults, and the children relented, even as their little hands clutched the rope.

And then, suddenly, the clock struck eleven, and the border was breached. The children on the southern front, with Kina, rushed in screaming, yanking the eggs from the grass and tossing them into the baskets at their hips. Kina fell to her knees in a cluster of pink eggs, sweeping great numbers of them into her pail as the thunder of footsteps echoed around her.

Today’s stop in the longest thing on earth: Governor’s Island (aka Staten Island, aka Long Island), our little pop-up newsroom.

dad

Start spreading the news etc etc

dad

Laurea and I are now well trained in recognizing the sound of Kina hitting the floor of her room at 6:30 AM. One can only imagine what it is like to live underneath her. Sorry, neighbor.

dad

I don’t know how it’s taken me three years to enter my cubist period.

dad

It’s not clear to this reporter who was really getting the most satisfaction from the nightly bath—the bather or the bathing assistant.

dad

Dear Kina,

The illustration at the top left of the page here is of the two of us, in 2020, drawing the first Daily Kina. You were three years old. If this newspaper were a person, it would be three now. That makes you six. You're good at math; you knew that.

The thing I've been thinking for the last few weeks is that I really don't know what three years feels like, and I don't think I'd ever fully considered it before—I've never stared squarely at that period of time. Until this very moment, three years didn't ever feel like a long time. It was shorter than most of the jobs I'd ever held, shorter than high school, shorter than a presidential administration.

Tomorrow is the third anniversary of this legacy media institution—don’t forget!—but this weekend was Top Spring, and we all know that Top Spring comes (like Daily Kina Day) but once a year. Kina made the most of it, as you can see. Boing crew and all.

Kina Oven Hands—for those who pay attention to the daily portrait—is the version of Kina I had to wrangle this morning as I finished the Sunday edition. She was a real charmer, and well-insulated from hot ovens.

A brief note before I begin: Monday is the third anniversary of the Daily Kina, and I’d like to invite you all to send over little mastheads, portraits, or headlines of your own in celebration of this auspicious occasion, which I will be pleased to share here. Thanks to all of you who find this newspaper a fulfilling daily ritual. We think of you often. Okay, let’s go:

There are seven and a half months every calendar year in which Kina and her oldest, dearest friend are the same age. That period has at last begun again, now that both of them are six.

You can help protect the Brooklyn Public Library from cuts by sending a note to your city council member and Mayor Adams, who—in addition to further reductions in education spending—has proposed vast cuts to services and hours in the public library systems of New York City in the upcoming budget, even as the NYPD blows through its half-billion dollar overtime allocation for fiscal year 2023. Libraries have consistently demonstrated their value to this city as safe and equitable spaces for New Yorkers of all ages. They support our citizens for a fraction of the cost of the carceral negligence our tax dollars otherwise fund. A library card is a powerful statement; bear it with pride.

dad