Small Town Living

I always kind of joke about Pleasantville a.k.a Mount Pleasant where I live as being such a quiet, quaint, Beaver Cleaver town. Well news flash. My boss told me a recent story of his neighbor’s teenage daughter, who one night gets a phone call from a man who asks if she is home alone. She was. She starts to get a little freaked then hears footsteps on her deck. Looks out through the sliding glass door and sees a man standing on her deck dressed in black, wearing a black ski mask talking to her on a cel phone. At this point she runs to the bedroom and locks herself in. Crawls under the bed and calls the police. Yikes – right?

Well, then I’m getting my hair cut last week and my stylist says, “Did you hear about the guy who dresses in black, black ski mask drives a black truck getting arrested?”
“Uhh… maybe…” I replied.
“Yeah”, she continued, “the guy got arrested for raping a girl about 20 miles north of here and one in another small town in the area”
“How did you hear about this?” I asked
“Well, I cut the hair of this teenage girl and her mom and… well, you might know them, they’re your bosses neighbors.” You can guess how the rest of the story goes.

Gets even more freaky when she says he lives just 2 blocks away from where I’m getting my hair cut. That’s it, I’m moving to south side Chicago where I can be safe!

What’s really, I mean really aggravating – no just plain disturbing is that the local newspaper, which ought to be starved for a story like this hasn’t printed word one about the whole thing. Small town gossip and the local radio station’s daily news fax (Link) is all I’ve heard about it.