You may recall that Kina developed a rudimentary sense of time earlier in the pandemic, but it’s only recently that she’s started to be more reflective about events in the past. We take for granted the experience of memory in ourselves (I, for one, spend most of my waking hours ping-ponging between worrying about the future and regretting the past) but to watch another person develop an awareness that there are things that happened in the past, and to see them revisit those moments—that’s a nifty thing. It’s also a little surprising, the things she remembers, because we never expected her to remember them: a trip to our friend Eric’s house in San Francisco, where our friend Chuckie gave her a stuffed avocado (which she promptly named “Chuckie Avocado”); that one time she made rice porridge with her mother on a Mommy-Daughter day; a visit from her Lala last June. It’s fun to watch her marvel at things “from when I was a baby”, but it also makes me feel old to see my child being wistful. She was young once, and time passes. Chuckie Avocado, on the other hand, is forever.

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