Carol Bergman

My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.

 

― Mary Wollstonecraft,  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792

 

Desire has trimmed the sails, and Circumstance brings but the breeze to fill them.

 

-George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 1876

 

In the end, the courage of women can't be stamped out. And stories - the big ones, the true ones - can be caught but never killed.

 

― Ronan Farrow, Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators, 2019

 

 

 

He holds her hand, which she reads as fraternal. Or, as taking her to the edge again, usually at the moment he announces departures. In that way, the seduction remains imminent, and she feels safe.

 

They are in a neighborhood very close to her home. This, in itself, makes her hopeful. But he decides to take a cab. Too lazy, he says. Working hard all day, so I'll walk you eastward, then I will leave you.  

 

And then, Let's go to the next uptown street. We'll catch a cab there.

 

She is not going home tonight, she realizes, noting the shift of pronoun to "we." 

 

Block after endless block in the mellow summer night and he is still holding her hand. She says, uncomfortably: You are holding my hand. He says, earnestly: Yes, I am.

 

That's so sweet, she says, pretending instead of feeling. As though it made any difference.  She drops his hand and shifts from his left side to his right.  She considers running away, fast.

 

Why did you do that?  he asks.

I don't want to knock you with my bag, she says, frightened.

 

She hopes he will forget he was holding her hand. But he doesn't. She has shifted sides and now he takes it again.

 

His arm is strong and tanned.

The skin on his hand is rough.

He is wearing  a white linen short-sleeved shirt.

He is holding her hand very tightly.

  ***

Less than an hour ago, he had scooted close to her on the banquette and kissed her cheek tenderly. She couldn't read it, at first. He had been to a picnic before meeting her, he said. All the participants, save one, were gay. The insouciant, seductive mood of these gay men was still with him. I escaped quickly, he said. Their conversation was shallow and didn't interest me.

 

And the food?

The food was good. They're in the business, wine and food. They meet in the park once a week during the summer and outdo each other.

 

And who invited you?

 

The former girlfriend of a friend. I couldn't say no. I earned some points by attending, but I didn't want to be there. I wanted to be here with you.

 

When he arrived at the restaurant he was breathless, and demanding. Where is the waiter, he asked. I need a drink.

 

The waiter had an ersatz Anglo name on his tag.

What's your real name? he asked.

His tone was derisive, even cruel.

 

She knew at once that the scorn was sleight of hand, nothing more. But the waiter blanched and left quickly. He had  a sculpted Roman face, and he looked kind. She wondered if he could rescue her.

 

Then, when the incident faded, and the drink arrived, she allowed herself to breathe, to move on. She had to conserve her strength for the denouement.

 

2.

 

Back out on the street in the mellow summer night, his arm is around her waist.  He hails a cab and says: You must come over now. 

 

He is wandering around the apartment like a lost dog. She imagines puppies shadowing him, nipping at his toes. The television and the stereo are covered with white towels. A document is open on the computer. She remains a schoolgirl in schoolgirl clothes, unable to escape, paralyzed. Her life, her ambition, has been interrupted, but only momentarily.  

 

Dedicated to the survivors.

 

 

In traumatic conditions, people think about where they stand amidst larger forces -- and they think about the why as well as the how of life. 

 

-Timothy Snyder, Substack, 12/6/2025

 

'So then you're free?'
'Yes, I'm free,' said Karl, and nothing seemed more worthless than his freedom.                                                                                                             

                                                   - Franz Kafka, Amerika, 1924

 

 

In the morning, in the evening, and at night these days, I imagine the small town where I live seen from above by satellites circling the earth. Specially designed instruments are recording our sufferation, as the Jamaicans call it, and sending distress signals to friends and allies overseas. From afar, we appear as distorted, uncouth figures, the detritus of a once proud, functioning nation state. The arrival of masked gunmen exuding the stench of medieval warriors descends like a thick fog on our communities and in our schools. We blow whistles to warn of their arrival, but the threat of inchoate violence penetrates every waking hour. We often feel as though we are being smashed with utmost force, if not physically, then spiritually. We march, we protest, we stand in silent vigil, we attend gatherings with kindred souls, we lay flowers on killing fields, we pray. Some days these antidotes suggested by our pundits and psychologists work, and some days they do not. Yet, we carry on regardless. There is no other choice. 

 

There are those among us, many of whom consider themselves "liberals," who maintain a strict cordon sanitaire around their lives. They do not read the newspapers, or watch the news, or worry about ICE arriving to sweep documented and undocumented brown people into "detention." Why not? I cannot say, but their silence and disregard feels callous at times. I wonder what they are saying to their children, or how they are protecting them from the  hellish realities of our present moment, a paraphrase of Tina Brown's substack today. It is wry, in the British tradition, and often makes me smile, a welcome facial expression after yet another overseas massacre and a lunatic with a gun still at large in Providence, RI.

 

I must not end this blog post, my 50th this year, on such a sour and forbidding note. Timothy Snyder suggests we make eye contact and small talk with everyone we meet, thus "affirming" them and listening deeply to their struggles and point of view. It is a deeply humane practice, and one I attempt to strengthen every day to counteract the negative loop in my head and to affirm my own engagement. Just this morning at the gym I met a buff young guy who works for our local utility company. He has two teenaged kids he worries about and mentioned the tragedy of Rob Reiner's drug-addicted son murdering his parents. I didn't ask this young father who he voted for, of if he voted, but if we continue to converse and get to know one another, I'll make an attempt. It will be my contribution to swinging the next election.

When you allow Palestinians and Jews to study together in the same school, it actually changes their brain chemistry… that's how healing begins.

 

-Amal Mattar, Hand in Hand, Alumna

 

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears...

 

-William Wordsworth, Intimations of Immortality

 

 

 

As an educator, a parent, and a descendant of the Jewish Holocaust, I think about the next generation, not just in the United States, but all over the world. As a journalist, I search for stories that promise a peaceful future. I remember my own childhood in New York City where the invisible walls of race and class were insurmountable for many. I grew up above 96th Street, but below 125th Street, what political scientists call the "interface." Rochelle, my best friend in elementary school, lived above 125th Street. I've written about Rochelle before, but she came to mind again today as I was reading the Hand in Hand newsletter. Rochelle's mother was a nurse, my mother was a doctor. Both women worked at Planned Parenthood, and they were also good friends. I don't know how Rochelle's mother got her into PS 75, far away from their home, but she did, perhaps with my mother's help. Every morning she picked me up and we walked down West End Avenue together. At the end of the day, we walked back up West End Avenue, walking and giggling and talking, and when Rochelle's mother picked her up to go home, they disappeared behind the invisible wall where Harlem began. Eventually I was able to articulate what that meant, but when Rochelle and I were children, our friendship was all that mattered. Rochelle and I were in the same class in school, our mothers worked together, we loved each other. Children do not experience the walls adults have constructed in their Jim Crow or apartheid laws.

 

It's admirable that in the midst of a war zone, in a divided, violent society, there are parents and teachers, Arabs and Jews, working for a peaceful future for their children. Their utopian ideals have not been shattered. What can an engaged, caring American citizen learn from them as the year turns to 2026?

 

1.    To sustain hope, we begin small, we change slowly. Hand in Hand began with only 50 children in 1998; it now has six campuses. USAID funding has been lost, but the project continues to flourish. Bilingual, it serves 2,000 children and is partially funded by the Israeli government. If ever there is a Palestinian state, and a semblance of restitution and reconciliation, perhaps there will be a Hand in Hand project in the West Bank also.

 

2.    When children are in proximity, they play together, they ease into connection. When adults are in proximity, amd their children are playing together, they talk and socialize. As an act of resistance, and despite fear and hesitation, we must continue to talk to everyone in our lives with an open, tender heart, and with civility.

 

3.    By modeling civic inclusion and equality, children learn civic inclusion and equality. Let us ask ourselves: Are our communities truly inclusive?

 

In November 2014, one of the Hand in Hand Schools was subjected to an arson attack. The school was defaced with anti-Arab graffiti. Just a few weeks ago, a house owned by the President of the Black Cultural Center in New Paltz, the town in Upstate New York where I live, was defaced with racist graffiti. In Israel,  the attack brought out a show of community support for the school. The Israeli police arrested a number of suspects. In New Paltz, there was a community meeting, but no arrests have as yet been made. The 5,000 + miles between these two locations feels like a stone's throw across a wall.

How can people profess faith in Jesus ― who preached love, mercy and care for the oppressed ― while supporting policies that punish immigrants, demonize LGBTQ people and glorify cruelty?

 

Caroline Bologna, Huffington Post, 11/15/2025

 

 

Well, I hope we care. I hope we care because the culture of contempt that has become normalized in this country threatens to destroy us.

          

Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, Washington National Cathedral, 1/22/2025

 

 

 

My cousin Randy sent me a link to a Huffington Post article about Maga Christians. He'd forwarded it to the Pastor of the Lutheran church in Ohio where he grew up; his sisters still attend the church. He wanted to know what the Pastor thought of the article. She wrote back a long email, somewhat pained I'd say as she admitted she was frustrated by her parishioners who are not thinking clearly. She loves the blues and the reds with a Pastor's love, of course, but is frustrated by their near total abnegation to "authority." How to educate them and still encourage their faith? How to help them "see" what's going down in too many neighborhoods in our beleaguered country? This is a progressive, thoughtful Pastor's challenge.

 

The moral questions raised by the violent actions, hate speech, and political demands of messianic Christians in America, messianic Jews in Israel, and Hindus in Kashmir, among too many religions and sects throughout the world, are challenging, if not dumbfounding. No one Pastor, Priest, Reverend, Bishop, Rabbi or Iman can untangle them easily. After all, they are men and women of faith, they are mortals, they are as flawed as the rest of us. But they do have a responsibility to their flock. If they become apologists for immorality, or amorality, they become unintentional collaborators with murderous regimes.

 

I'm reminded of Hitler, born into a Catholic family in Catholic Austria, he moved to Protestant Germany where the Nazi Party's propaganda assured the populace that the Führer had the same beliefs and goals as Martin Luther. Luther's teachings contributed to the rationale for the genocide. He even wrote a screed called "Jews and Their Lies." 

 

It is nearly a year since the Bishop of Washington Cathedral, the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, spoke to the politicians in the pews without obfuscation, caution, or apology. If the targeted cruelty of the current administration does not abate in 2026, we must ask ourselves what small actions we can take every day to assuage the pain of those who suffer the most in our communities. Asking questions of professionals who educate and console is one way to challenge the ecosystem of hate. My cousin's email to the Pastor in Ohio was a request for accountability, a morally centered "Christian" example from a man who cares.

 

I survived, but it's not a happy ending.
          

 - Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried

 

        How nice -- to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

          ― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

 

 

 

In the midst of this one particular war—the  war in Gaza, the war on Gaza—there  were too many dead children and too many wounded orphan children. Doctors Without Borders gave them a name: Wounded Child No Surviving Family, WCNSF.

 

What is too many? One is too many.

 

Apart from rescue operations, many of which fail even as they inspire hope, the stench of death is absolute in every war zone  Unless they are soldiers or humanitarian workers, most Americans are spared the sorrow of witnessing such losses: 25,000 dead children, 50,000 wounded children (UNICEF). Even the horror of 9/11 does not come close to such devastation. Nor does a hurricane, or other natural disasters. Of course, the U.S. of America has sent plenty of soldiers to fight in wars overseas, and supported others with armaments, expertise and intelligence. Are there just wars? Necessary wars? Probably, most definitely in some obvious instances. To stop a genocide, for example, as in WW II, or Rwanda. The soldiers never arrive on time, or they simply never arrive.

 

I am raising questions because, in truth, I am not an expert, and I do not understand destruction and mayhem most of the time. Why this war? Why that one? Is a response to an attack "appropriate"? Or not? And if it is not, who will be held to account? And how? Will the international courts and international humanitarian law still exist in ten years? In twenty?

 

And then, closer to my home, I read that a survivor of the war in Afghanistan, who is attending Bard College, has been swept into detention. And we see images of masked men—are there any women?— smashing the heads and hearts of protestors. Are we now living in a war zone, the first war on American soil since 1812? Are these masked men "the enemy within?"  It certainly seems so.

 

In the midst of evil we carry on regardless. We want to protect our friends and families and co-workers. We do our best to stand up for them, and for ourselves. We must not stop. But there are days, and moments within those days, when we must withdraw to rest. The broken cup on my kitchen floor remains shattered, or it is partially mended when there is good news, but remains mostly shattered.

 

Usually, as Thanksgiving approaches, I plan a gathering of friends and family, and I cook, which is unusual for me. The gathering is a promise I made to my husband when we married: I will cook you a Thanksgiving meal every year wherever we are. Since I have lived in upstate New York, I have invited one or two international students from the local college to join our celebration. Sadly, there are very few international students on campus this year. I'm grateful that there are airplanes crisscrossing the country again, though, and our relatives from California can join us at the table.

 

Is the end of war and suffering—international and domestic—ever in sight? Or will it come upon us unexpectedly after years of struggle? Or arrive only piecemeal, one victory at a time? Or never arrive at all?

 

This post is dedicated to all children in war zones.

 

 

And it may seem now like it's someone else's children but there's no such thing as someone else's children…It was just what happened to certain places, to certain people, they became balls of pale white light.

 

--Omar Al Akkad, One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

 

 

I try to imagine what it must be like to be a Palestinian right now, to witness another  Nakba (catastrophe)—unfold in real time from a street far away in a peaceful town in the mid-Hudson Valley in New York, and to wonder which friends and relatives have been deracinated from their homes in Gaza, or gravely wounded, or buried under rubble. Was it the same for Jews in the diaspora as the Warsaw Ghetto was obliterated? Such an imagining is both necessary and futile. Necessary to remain sane and empathetic. Futile because the killing juggernaut could not be stopped. The Jewish Holocaust continued unabated,  the promise of a Palestinian nation-state has not been realized, and Khartoum has been over-run by descendants of the murderous Janjaweed militia. How far back in time do we have to go to find such genocidal killing sprees at their source? How far forward in time until they end?  Razan Sadeq-Keyes, resident of Huguenot Street in New Paltz, has created an installation as a set for a theatrical production next to her house that asks us to reflect on the ongoing devastation in Gaza. "I have several Jewish neighbors and they have all been very supportive," she told me in a recent telephone interview.

 

It took ten days for Razan to write a script for the agitprop production. It was performed by friends and colleagues on Halloween. Resident of Huguenot Street since 2021 with her American-born husband and now two young children, Razan, who works for a tech company, does not have a background in theater. "I felt like a vessel  as I was writing," she told me.  She participated in the performance holding her baby, and describes the emotional sensation as "embodying grief." After the performance, the "set," a replica of a tent in a refugee camp, remains standing.

 

When her father registered her as a citizen of Palestine in Nablus in the West Bank 25 years ago, Razan could not have understood what it meant.  But she does now. "If Palestine is ever a country, I will have citizenship there," she says.

 

 

 

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.

 

-Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

 

 

 

Maintaining a sense of humor in an operating theater, while  more or less awake I must add, is not easy. We'd had a 5 a.m. wake-up on the morning of my first cataract surgery, and a humorous perspective, shall we say, was not top of mind. We got there, I paid the hefty co-pay, we relaxed in the waiting room, my husband fell back to sleep under his baseball hat. And then, finally, I was called into the staging area for all the preliminaries—more drops in the eyes, blood pressure, etc. etc. The woman next to me said, "I've heard this surgery is a breeze."

 

"Well, it depends what you mean by "breeze," I mumbled. I was not feeling particularly breezy. I was tense. I was hungry. I was exhausted. Maybe it was because I had been fasting and was ravenous, or because I'd had little sleep, but it took a while for my observing writer's brain to kick in and note, with satisfaction and curiosity, the diversity of all the attending nurses and techs, particularly their eyewear. One very tall tech was flirting with the anesthesiologist who had just checked my height and weight for what he called  "twilight" anesthesia.  He was handsome, true, but she was embarrassing herself, and me, with the twists and turns of her lanky body. And her eyewear: thick black funky frames. Have you noticed that both men and women are wearing thick funky color-coordinated frames these days? I interrupted her flirtation with, "I like your frames." She turned, laughed, and thanked me.  I was suddenly in focus again, not as a patient, but as a person

 

Then I started feeling cold and asked for a blanket. I had been instructed to wear a loose-fitting blouse. I don't wear blouses so I borrowed one of my husband's interesting shirts. I liked it, it cheered me, but the surgical staging area was arctic. I asked for a blanket. No problem, it was on me in minutes. I think it was made of disposable papier mâché. It felt like candy floss, more air and light than substance.

 

Finally it was my turn to be walked into the operating theater and settled onto a slab-like gurney. An array of men dressed in blue scrubs were standing at attention to one side—instrument reps, I think, supervising the installation of an update of the laser? An update!!  So bright were those circular lights that I felt as though I was entering a space ship. I let my mind drift as my surgeon told me I was doing great, really great, and there were only a few seconds left of floating in outer space.

 

When it was over the doc asked how I was feeling. "It was like childbirth, " I said to her.

 

"Childbirth?" she asked, perplexed.

 

I was too drowsy to explain what I meant. And I am not exactly sure what I meant except to say: all the pre-op instructions did not prepare me sufficiently for the actual event. The actual event was much more interesting.

 

 

 

When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don't see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.

 

― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

 

  

A pun on eyes to begin my blog post today as I am having cataract surgery on Tuesday. Eye #1 gets an update. And I am relieved; it's blurry. Now comes the hard part: the cost of "laser assisted" surgery which is required in my case. I figure the surgeon knows of what she recommends. I do not doubt her. But my insurance company does. There is only a code for ultrasound, they say, not laser.  Are you sure she is in network?  And so on and so forth, as the conversation spins off into outer space.

 

Who will take responsibility? Who is in charge? Who will untangle the patient from the tentacles of worry about surgery, payment for the surgery, and the unending phone calls to the provider and the insurance company until she is so exhausted she gives up and pays out of pocket, which is exactly what the insurance company, who is not exactly insuring her, wants her to do.

 

I have a letter I wrote to United Health Care after my husband's cataract surgery. It's addressed to the former CEO of the company who has since been killed on the streets of New York City. That letter is now a collectible. I suppose the company has had a lot of meetings since then re: how do we save our customer base and grow it? I was not surprised to receive three phone calls in the past three weeks from 1) customer service (Taylor) and 2) the grievance department (Jan). Nice people, both of them. Polite, affable, friendly, interesting, seemingly concerned. Jan grew up in my neighborhood and misses it, Taylor is in South Carolina as he speaks and wishes me well with the surgery. But I still have to pay up front and then apply for reimbursement.

 

I asked Taylor and Jan if they'd heard of Catch-22, if they know what it is: a world in which no one takes responsibility. My question was a conversation stopper.

 

So, in a country without the safety net of universal health care, what does health insurance mean exactly? Not enough. It's not a "system" that works, and it is not sustainable.

 

I reflect often these days on the decade I lived in the UK where everyone is the beneficiary of universal health care and where my daughter was born. Before her birth we received delivery of a "layette," the basic necessities for the first few weeks of life. Our primary care physician made house calls. There was no charge for medications. I could go on.

I am sure much has changed since we left the UK re: problems with funding and waiting lists for life-saving procedures. But the intent is there, and  no matter the government in power, medical care is considered a human right. The populace, meaning everyone,  is spared the indignity and stress of begging an "insurance" company for coverage.  

 

 

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk…

 

-Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (2005)

 

Because, to put it reductively, what gets attention is a very different category from what's important for sustaining a flourishing society.

― Chris Hayes, The Sirens' Call: How Attention Became the World's Most Endangered Resource (2025)

 

 

 

I read Postman in grad school and have recently returned to his books in between and alongside Chris Hayes' mindbender. Inspired by Postman and Hayes, kindred thinkers a generation apart, I've been keeping my eye on the firings, defunding, abnegations, and resistance in media organizations.

 

I am sure, for example, that the commentators on Morning Joe were thrilled when they heard that John Grisham had been booked to publicize "The Widow," his 51st book. There were questions that any experienced journalist might have asked during that interview, but everyone around the table was dumbstruck and fawning. I've always wondered if Grisham had any assistants poring over the news to generate story ideas, or a plot. Why didn't anyone ask that question? And what about his former active opposition to the death penalty? Is he still involved in that struggle given the retro climate in the country? And so on. Instead, Grisham was allowed time to recount his well-known daily writing routine without interruption, and ended with the complacent "and then I go out and play a round of golf."  Everyone dissolved into giggles.

 

Bad news for professional media watchers accelerated when Bari Weiss became Editor-in-Chief of CBS news and asked—or  insisted, or suggested—that 60-minutes reporter, Leslie Stahl, interview  "peace negotiator" Steve Witkoff and his sidekick, Jared Kushner, last week. Why did Leslie Stahl agree to Weiss's "request?"  What did Bari Weiss, or someone else, say to her behind closed doors? To watch Leslie Stahl stumble as she asked inane questions was painful, until she got to the word "genocide." For an instant, the bold Leslie Stahl surfaced.

 

The authors of Project 2025 would undoubtedly prefer the silencing of intelligent, informed interlocutors, and an unquestioning stupefied populace, to complete the demolition of American democracy. 

The way to secure liberty is to place it in the people's hands, that is, to give them the power at all times to defend it in the legislature and in the courts of justice.     -John Adams

 

A people fired ... with love of their country and of liberty, a zeal for the public good, and a noble emulation of glory, will not be disheartened or dispirited by a succession of unfortunate events. But like them, may we learn by defeat the power of becoming invincible.    - Abigail Adams

 

―  From The Letters of John and Abigail Adams

 

  

Early in the morning of the No Kings demonstrations, before sunrise, before breakfast, I called a dear friend in Bath, UK, to remind myself that as much as I resisted leaving England after a decade, an eventual return to America was inevitable for personal, political, professional and historical reason. In conversation with my dear friend, explaining and complaining about all that has transpired here, I wanted to test my commitment to the American Experiment. I complained more than I explained, and for an instant I felt disloyal, which is a strange sensation for me. I consider myself cosmopolitan and transnational most of the time, and I love London (and Bath) with a heart-stopping devotion.  So why this sensation of disloyalty?

 

I had turned down Austrian and EU citizenship—the  first phase of my self-imposed test—though  I had fantasized often about once again sitting in cafés in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Prague, and London and meeting a cohort of writer friends at the end of each working day. But this was before the implementation of Project 2025, the not so slow-moving fascist coup. Now that we are in the midst of a myriad of day-to-day challenges that have impacted every family in my orbit in some way, I cannot imagine jumping ship, or can I?  And how privileged I am to even contemplate such an eventuality.

 

I put on a yellow headband for No Kings Day. I thought of the British reverence for their still extant monarchy despite the recent disturbing news about Prince Andrew, and an experience I had in the House of Lords when I was called to testify to a committee about an article I'd written for The Times Educational Supplement. And one of the Lords said, "We thank Mrs. Bergman for her article and suggest she return to America posthaste."  If memory serves, and it usually doesn't, I think he also said, "where she belongs."

 

So, America is where I belong and where I set out on No Kings Day to donate a bag of clothes to a local church and dump my compost in the compost pile before attending a celebration sponsored by the Margaret Wade Lewis Center which will be housed in the Anne Oliver House on Broadhead Avenue in New Paltz. It seemed appropriate on this celebration of freedom of assembly and freedom of speech day to show up there to support Esi Lewis after her house had been violated with racist tropes; the perpetrator has still not been caught. She's the President of the Center; her mother, Margaret Wade Lewis, was one of the first Chairs of the Black Studies Department at SUNY New Paltz. The Ulster County Executive, Jen Metzger, was there, as was the Town Supervisor, Amanda Gotto. I chatted to Amanda about the outpouring of camaraderie, the massive turnouts at protests everywhere, and then snapped some photos. It was a mellow, sunny day and everyone was engaged, high-spirited, and optimistic.