I took a walk with my camera on Saturday through Little Italy up the Mayfield road hill. While I love hanging out with people, I love those moments of solitude too especially when it's by choice, when I can let the leaves crunch, explore a bit, wander in and out of art galleries, end up having conversations with random people having yard sales and trashpicking furniture off the front lawns of apartment buildings.
Carved pumpkins with my neighbors on Friday night, and we made salsa with the produce from her garden, and then Sunday was our annual church Halloween party for the neighborhood which makes me think of both really Pentecostal churches and that one skit where Eddie Izzard is talking about the Pope.
Over 600 kids and parents came in and I passed out candy and ran the soccer game with the help of the Ethiopian kids, and did end up dressing up this year in a kimono a friend gave me awhile back, watching the kids and parents come through with some truly awesome costumes.
I realized as I watched the constant flow of families and kids through the building that this is probably one of the only events in the neighborhood where the whole community shows up, where I'm hearing Spanish, Lingala, Amharic, and Kreyol, watching the children of the new urbanistas mingle with the kids who lives in the Section 8 apartments and the refugee kids who show up excited at this strange new holiday where you wear crazy clothes and everyone gives you candy.
Seeing families hanging out together, neighbors meeting up, and kids having fun in a safe place just made me happy. I don't find the holiday as magical as I did when I was younger, but to be able to make it fun for the next generation was a beautiful thing.
Is it weird that Halloween reminds me again why I stayed in this city and even with the lameness and frustration of Election Day, glad to live in this country?
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