Half of a Life

Milestones, in short:

1. One week

2. 100 days

3. Until school starts

4. At the end of the pandemic (ha)

5. One year

6. After kindergarten

7. Two years

8. When she asks me to stop

9. Three years

10. When she’s lived more days as the publisher of The Daily Kina than not, which is today, more or less—something I realized only as I drifted off to sleep last night and reminded myself furiously to recall first thing in the morning. Imagine writing a daily newspaper about your newborn child for the first three years of her life, until you are stopped in your tracks by a global pandemic and a terrible bout of Covid. Imagine that everything stops. Now imagine the inverse, in which your child is three years and four months old, and that same pandemic shocks you into a realization that today matters, and you draw a moose on construction paper for your kid. Imagine you do it the next day. Now imagine just… continuing? Forever, presumably? That is what this feels like. It feels like a second chance that just spools out into the rest of time, or until she asks me to stop.

11. Who knows?

dad