I’ve never known a child to care so tenderly for an object designed to burst. She walked everywhere yesterday with the balloon nestled inside her Hello Kitty helmet (shown here at top right), swinging from her elbow like a handbag. She got it at ten in the morning from a kid in Gowanus, on one of the nicest playgrounds I’ve ever seen in Brooklyn—amidst a fleet of garbage trucks. The kid’s name, I kid you not, was Heaven.

“I’m Not a Fan of Cheeseburgers,” Declares Local Heretic

I’ve been trying to sort this out for over a year. I’ve plied her with every cheeseburger you can imagine. Bits of cheeseburger. Cheeseburgers with no burger that I can then inform her are “mostly cheeseburger”. It’s just today that she’s finally told me, unequivocally, that she’s no officially no fan. I’m not sure what I’ll do with this going forward—the love of cheeseburgers seems like a family tradition (Laurea, as her triumphant return from vegetarianism, chose Shake Shack for her début). We’ll find common ground in some food or another—pasta seems likely, pizza if you can tolerate how she eats it (see last Wednesday’s edition). We will learn to live with the disappointment. More for me.

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