Oh, today I am in Madison {WI} visiting Jan and taking care of business. I drove down here yesterday via Edgerton and Stoughton, carrying my expired driver’s license. I dropped Donna off in her little small town world and hospital, a Peyton Place. Then I stopped in to see sister Mary, return some baby stuff of hers & say goodbye.
I went to the daycare center where Jan works, & made a hit with the kids. They warmed to me immediately. It was fun for a half-day or so, but the attention-demanding little darlings would wreck my nerves in less than a week. Jan even talks about switching jobs.
I went up State Street to try to get some of my errands run, and bought a radio / tape recorder as I had thought of doing. I also made the first contact to try to get Mom & Dad into a Costa Rica tour that begins on the day of my wedding. I hope it works out.
Last evening there was a 3-hour NBC special on violence in America. As its example of rural crime, it featured my hometown & county. There have been a series of homicides there under unusual circumstances. They ignored the factor of a new federal prison in the county, dwelled upon the freak murder of an 18-yearold local girl by her flipped out boyfriend (reportedly, he is the incredibly spoiled son of the local banker), and concluded with the idea that local folks live in constant fear & tension. Jan described the grieving mother of the dead girl as a bleached blond aggressive gossip, who pushed her child to be the sex symbol she fantasized being. In today’s Capital Times {a Madison newspaper} the girl’s father got his lick in saying Friendship was the most vicious small town he had ever seen.
Funny, in 3 weeks I completely missed out on the paranoia! Perhaps a man is blindest to his own environment, but I didn’t see any good representatives of the old guard, solid citizens in the footage. NBC seemed to be talking to the types who told them what they wanted to hear. They came into Friendship with a thesis, & cut & narrated their film to support it.
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