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.