We made this edition at the gate for our early flight to San Francisco, penned in by bags and under a tight deadline. We are now in California, so the presses obviously ran as expected, though we are all a bit more tired than usual here at newsletter time and are deciding just now, late in a drawn-out second sentence, to hit the sack.

When you’re drawing the Parade on a narrow little counter in the boarding area, you produce what is strangely the first landscape edition of Parade in history.

Always listen to scientists.

dad

Kina, age three, had just started taking ballet classes when the lockdown hit. Her ballet school had arranged for a recital in June of 2020, and we’d ordered a little pink tutu from the school that was due to arrive in May. It did not arrive on time, as you might imagine, and the recital never happened. We picked up the tutu at the front door of the studio in September, and Kina proceeded to wear it at home every day for several months. I wrote about this on September 5, 2020, under the headline “Ballerina, Denied Recital, Wears Tutu Nonetheless”.

According to this august publication, Kina and Sloane started taking secret Covid dance classes all the way back on March 19, 2021. At the time, those classes were really more of a hopping-and-balancing school than anything else, conducted by a local dancer whose performance work had (understandably) dried up. Fast forward just two months, though, and our local ballerina was teaching her parents how to execute a perfect port de bras. In April of this year, Kina admonished me to focus if I wanted to be a ballet dancer.

And yesterday, with her friend Sloane, in a brand new pink tutu, she danced the Waltz of the Flowers from the Nutcracker, which took all of a minute and a half to play out, but represented the culmination of fifteen months of joyful practice. It was delayed a week as their teacher recovered from Covid, but unlike Kina’s earlier pandemic recital, this time the show went on.

On Tuesday, when careful readers will recall that Kina made a surprise visit to the Bronx Zoo, I woke up early and felt a little thrill that I would be going to the zoo on my first day of summer vacation. I could take my time getting ready, put on some shorts, toss some cheddar bunnies in the backpack, and hop on the train for a jaunt with the hippos. It took me all of three blissful seconds to recall that I was not Kina, that I last had a school break in 1996, and that I would not, on any random Tuesday, be going to the zoo.

After I graduated from college (during which, even on semester breaks, I would work for the summer), I felt for several years the phantom limb of the school calendar hanging off the side of my body. September would come, and I would work. Mid-December, the work continued. The cherry blossoms emerged and fell, and still there was work. When your formative years put tight creases at the edges of summer, it’s hard not to trip over them year after year. I think a lot of the early bitterness and resentment that comes with adulthood is built on the lost formlessness of summertime—replaced by The Hustle.

Eventually, though, the creases smoothed out, and I came to accept reluctantly that one works whenever one can (the alternative being more difficult logistically from a rent and food standpoint), and the vast expanse of summer abandon withered off to three little holiday nubs of Memorial Day, July 4th, and Labor Day. This is fine, or was, until my child graduated from Kindergarten, and I woke up on the first day of her summer break thinking I had two months of unbridled liberty and fun visits to the zoo and aquarium—and then had to go to work with that droning on in my head all day.

Bajour!

dad

End of an era, out with a burrito.

dad

At least somebody in this house has a reasonable brain this week and is getting a good night’s sleep.

dad

Inexplicably, I have no photos of the first time Kina met her classmates at the turtle fountain in McCarren Park, but I did manage to discover a short piece in the September 12, 2021 issue that covered the affair:

Now she’s buds with all those opaque shadow children! They fill water balloons together and make mischief! They have all now become school chums, and I have become a class dad who knows the other class dads, and I realize now that I will spend the next several years of my life in New York City watching these kids grow up and being friends with the class dads.

Yesterday, as I was writing out a list of things people could do as we move forward to create a better government and society, I wrote out the following rough list:

• Protest

• Run

• Vote

• Fund

• Aid

• Speak

• Amplify

Each of these words came with a rudimentary description of the ways in which I felt I personally needed to do that thing. Vote locally (for example) for representatives with real spine and energy, and to maintain the majority; protest, in every sense of the word, to build that spine in our existing representatives; fund organizations that will help people in need in hostile states to obtain safe abortions, but also fund the candidates you want to vote for, and fund mutual aid societies that support the people most at risk now—who are often also most at risk of being unhoused, assaulted, and unfed.

I refuse to let six robed judicial goons deny this child her well-deserved flowers.

This is the third end-of-year celebration Kina has had since the inception of The Daily Kina, but in many ways the most significant of the three. Songs were sung, capes were decorated, names were announced, her grandparents were watching. This time, unlike the last two, Kina had spent months with the other children in her class and had grown up with them. She introduced us to her friends and hugged them with abandon.

Laurea cried. And not just for the reasons that parents tend to at these affairs, but also because of the goons.

Thanks to Ms Chelsea, Kina’s kindergarten teacher, who accomplished the impossible on a daily basis over the course of the last school year. Kina loves you, and she thinks you have astonishing taste in dresses.

dad

Kina really struggled to make sense of our evening alone yesterday while I couldn’t speak, thinking somehow that she wasn’t being fun enough to make me engage her in conversation. Sorry, kid.

In case it is hard to read, here is what the illustration of our top headline depicts:

Kina, shouting from other room: “DADDY YOUR NAME IS SPACE TOOTH!”

I knew I should have brought the bike.

dad

Kina did most of the illustrations today, as a bit of a belated Father’s Day gift. Someday, you’ll have to ask Laurea about waking up to a blood-red child and how long it took to realize that Kina had simply taken a red brush marker and painted her entire body with it. Other than that, it’s all about the random butter quote. And we’re out.

dad

Happy Father’s Day to me and to this kid and her mother who worked so hard to make me a father, and to other fathers out there who are working to get it right, and to those of you who don’t find this day as joyous as I do—I hope you find comfort today.

Dad jokes all around—you deserve them.

I will remind the long term readers that the earliest editions of this newspaper focused on our efforts to get Kina to poop in the toilet, and now she knows what a crush is.

dad

How could I possibly interrupt this genius for such a trivial distraction as oral hygiene?

dad

I don’t know how I feel about Kina practicing her lying skills, but at least we are doing it together, so fine. I’ve been fooled!!

dad

While literally nobody was watching, some of Kina’s friends made a little murder thriller on a phone in the leafy corner of McCarren Park. Kina played “Detective 3”; she had a line, but they cut it because she forgot to hit her mark.

It was: “Oh, no! Another victim!”

dad

I really hesitated to run today’s top headline, but it needed to be addressed. We will have no further comment at this time.

dad