One of Kina’s famous 4-hour fevers forced her to delay eating ice cream until after a nap. Also: her main beef with the first ice cream was that it was too crunchy.
Kina has developed a really charming habit of standing on stage while people applaud for group performances, just soaking it all up for herself. Give it up for “A”!
Hannah is probably the closest non-blood-related family that Kina has—or that I have, for that matter. She has raised this kid to be a fantastic human being in her own image, and I am profoundly grateful for her. She also shares a birth year with me, and so we spend lots of time complaining about various aches and pains and talking about how we like desserts that are not too sweet. Happy birthday to you, Hannah, and may your cake be none too sweet.
I hesitated to mention in this edition the kid who approached Kina and her other Asian-American classmate at gym class and just lobbed a mindbogglingly racist slur at them. I also hesitated before googling the specific linguistic formulation of this slur, and my stomach sank when no results turned up, because it suggested that this kid heard it from somebody, somewhere, who recited it from memory. I hesitated when she came home after school with Laurea and we sat on the couch to talk about it and tell her that we are bigger than the words the people use to hurt us; I hesitated as I considered what I wanted to tell her to do in the future—to tell an adult, sure, but to get in that kid’s face? To shout? To snarl? To spit? I hesitated before telling her she was strong, because I feel more conviction about the weakness of people who use these words, and the tragedy that little Asian girls have to be strong specifically to meet this weakness. I hesitated because the kid is also seven, and white, and has never had to hear his parents talk about being demeaned or passed over or dismissed because of the color of their skin, never had to see somebody who looked like them at work—somebody who has risen to the top of their field—called out by a senior leader not for their actual work but for the food eaten in the country of their birth. I hesitate to say that the kid might simply have found the language of the slur exciting and curious and was literally just telling Kina and her friend about the slur because he thought they might be interested to hear it—and because nobody, when it was said in front of him, suggested that it was a horrible thing to call a person. I hesitated to be angry yesterday, because Laurea was angry and I couldn’t afford to be angry. I was angry all day today, instead, unable to shake the memory of Kina telling me she got a couple math problems wrong “because the thing had happened just before and I couldn’t focus”. I hesitated to put this in the top slot because I think the dolphins are the thing that I want her to remember about yesterday, but at the end, I put it in the second slot, because I want her not to forget.
She’s fine. She’s safe. She has a good teacher and good friends. She has parents who are ready for this and who know it won’t be the last time. She loves dolphins, but it’s hard to say if they’re extinct.
She closes her eyes and tells me to let her know if anything is in her way. She walks alongside me and calls out the colors behind her eyelids: blue, violet, blue, burgundy. She turns left with me, and I tell her the the road ahead is straight and clear, and it is burgundy. Blue again, then left into the parking garage and down the ramp, violet.
Just a minute before this, I stunned her by guessing that she had eaten a beef patty for lunch. I have never seen her so gobsmacked, and it was almost a tragedy that I had to tell her I just looked at the school lunch menu. She would want me to tell you that she had no such study aid when she guessed, accurately, that I snarfed down a cheeseburger for lunch.
Kina and I spent her entire bathtime playing out various wishes that could go awry at the hands of a nefarious magic mirror.
Wish you could run fast? What if you could never stop running fast? Best, instead, to wish that you could run fast “for just a little while and then stop.”
Wish you could hug Mommy forever? What if that meant you had to drag Mommy around to school and on hot days? Best to say you wish you could hug her “during certain times at night and she wouldn’t go back to her bed.”
You know, it seems not really a good thing for my mental health that my kid has to tell me that she is “not an illusion”. She is right, though—I do love blue and green.
When I was a kid, my dad had a manual typewriter that he kept in a room downstairs. This was obviously before computers and home-office electric typewriters, and it sat on his desk largely unused (as far as I could tell). There was one day, though, when I heard him clacking away at the keys, pushing back the carriage return and rolling the platen to release the paper—the first edition of a publication he had titled The Churchill Downs Bugle (after the street we lived on, not the horse race). It’s hard for me to remember, at this age, the specific headlines of that newspaper, and the issues that followed it, but I remember reading it over and over and laughing at his puns and the stories about me and my siblings. It felt special to see myself on a page—to see what my dad saw that was funny about me.
Almost four years ago, I joked with my dad that I had surpassed his output as a newspaper magnate, which was a bit unfair, as The Churchill Downs Bugle contained fully reported and written-through articles with actual jokes and was laid out (if I recall correctly) in two columns and was (absolutely) produced on a manual typewriter. By contrast, The Daily Kina is basically three headlines, a few illustrations, and several horizontal lines that suggest the existence of puns.
Nonetheless, The Daily Kina is inspired by The Churchill Downs Bugle in a way. The morning I wrote the first edition, I pulled out a sheet of pink construction paper and some of Kina’s crayons, and I wrote down the thing she had said to her mother just a few moments earlier: “YOU A CHEESE FIEND HUH”—a hilarious and extremely accurate observation. It was Friday, and it was quiet outside the house and quiet inside the house; a pandemic was raging, quietly, outside, and all the playgrounds were shuttered. We had run out of patience with Daniel Tiger (“A Grreat Show”) and I remember feeling the need to memorialize what was happening to Kina, who was only three and had no point of reference for how a reasonable Friday should feel.
It’s kind of shocking how being in elementary school acquaints you with so many more human beings who live nearby. I have lived in this literal apartment for 24 years, and I don’t know that I’ve ever run into nine people I know in a single day in this neighborhood. Seven year olds are wild!
Matthew, Kina’s swim teacher for the last several months, has not been around for the last five weeks or so. We knew he was an actor and in college, and we assumed that he was simply working on a gig or on the road, but when Laurea asked the lifeguard in passing when Matthew was coming back, her reply was, “He’s not coming back.”
This all happened within earshot of Kina, his most devoted fan, who immediately burst into tears. She has not bonded with either of Matthew’s steady replacements, who are less funny and more intense than Matthew had been. We think she had been counting the weeks until he would return, and learning that he would not return was too much for her to bear.
Laurea convinced her to hop into the pool for a bit, to blow some bubbles and give it a go with her new teacher, but she couldn’t stop crying and eventually asked to leave.
It was too rainy to ride the bike, and the car was locked in the garage, and the L train wasn’t running. A literal perfect storm. Sorry, kid. This is how the pioneers did it.
I didn’t know what to expect from Storyville Mosquito when my brother invited us to see it, but I can assure you it is not what I would have expected, had I expected anything at all. It’s a beautiful puppet show, a sort of opera, a one-take film, and a chance to see Kid Koala play.
Thanks to Ken for the tickies; it was a real gas. Boo to the spider. Mosquito! Mosquito!
This newspaper is proof that, if you listen closely enough, you will find that any given seven year old is likely pitching Inception to you in the living room after dinner.
Runa and Kina seem to know an awful lot about this show that they have clearly not watched in an extremely long time.
I misspelled “Gabby’s” in the headline, which is why the show name is in blue.
I have learned recently just how habitually I say “Yo!” in response to questions and how frequently I use the pet name “Bud” with both Kina and Laurea, and how both of them hate that so very very much. I am sorry to both of you; I seriously do not realize I am doing it.
What I love most about this headline is that it is unclear who the chili is meant to be. Unclear antecedents are the best part of any headline—fight me. Anyhow, there is something vaguely appealing to me about getting snuggled for two hours and then turning into a fantastic pot of chili. It is, of course, equally appealing to stir Kina’s face for hours on end while she opines about life as a bowl of chili, but I didn’t get the snuggles, so moot point.
What I wish you could have seen in the production of today’s Parade is how Kina used it as a means of teaching Laurea how to draw roses. Also, the lily is fantastic.