Halloween visitors lift spirits of neighborhood

This Thanksgiving, when our family sits down at the table, we will be thankful for the 150 children, older students and some parents who braved freezing temperatures this Halloween, and came to our door, stepped up to the microphone and told a joke for our neighborhood to hear.

We’ll also be thankful to our neighbors, who embraced the crowds our craziness brought to our street when I mounted a billboard 10 years ago and greeted children with a skeleton who demanded a joke or song for their Halloween treat. We saw rows of headlights coming up our street resembling the scene in the “Field of Dreams” and heard stories of family meetings to decide what joke to tell at our house.

Entertaining people in public isn’t easy. Those who came to our door this Halloween, and did their best to make us smile with jokes and songs, left us laughing and, hopefully, had as good a time as we did. This year, a ten-person high school choir sang for their treat, and some came repeatedly back to the microphone with another joke.

These days when our so-called leaders in Des Moines smugly thumb their noses at doctors, climate scientists, teachers, librarians, schools, election officials, journalists, immigrants, asylum-seekers, people who are different than they or who pray differently, people in need of health care or those unemployed, each of the smiling faces at our door lifted our spirits and made a difference in renewing our hope for Iowa.

Dennis Naughton

Cedar Rapids