Everybody in the park on Sunday

I went walking around Central Park Sunday, 843 acres of paradise in the middle of the metropolitan grid; that always makes a person feel good because it contradicts all you read about AI, alienation, angst, atrophy of the arts, urban disaffection and antagonisms — you walk among flocks of different individuals being themselves and also enjoying flocks of dissimilars in passing, a parade of heterogenuflecting homogenuineness, joggers each jogging to their own drumbeat, dogs towing their people, papas pushing babies in strollers, little princesses, cool kids on scooters, elders freed from their four walls, everybody talking, phrases flying past — I don’t see why — I told her, Don’t — it’s nice the blue jay is pretty because it’s a mean bird and the shriek — and for me, a writer from a family of separatist evangelicals who brought me up to avoid the worldly, it is a Carnival of Humanity, it is a feast, everybody is cheerful, how could they be otherwise?