B77 - Woodstock aka Pleasantville

’06 Sept 07 After breakfast I went downtown to see if there were any New Age stores in Woodstock. I walked down main street and found four Christian book store and two Christian missionary stores but not one New Age or even close….. It’s like the Maritimes….even worse!!!! It’s a clean little town….actually it’s a small city. As I drove though town I thought of the movie “Pleasantville” where everyone was nice and pleasant but unreal, ignorant and in denial. I know that when I attended my daughters wedding here I felt a lot of phony presentation smiles and niceness with a dark undercurrent much like what I experienced in the Maritimes…

When I came back I talked to Marian about this bible thumping town ands she agreed and said that she thought that it was mostly protestant. I checked the phone book and of the more than 50 churches, Baptists and Anglicans have the most with only three Catholic churches… the rest are other protestant denominations… Marian also mentioned that she goes to church to socialize…Hummm?

’06 Sept 08 I had gone to visit my daughter Janice last night and I told her that I was thinking of returning to Barrie to get a room there as Marian already had a border and that there really wasn’t the space for three separate people sharing a house, as Gary had the exclusive use of the upstairs bathroom and that I was to use the guest bathroom by the front entrance and to use her ensuite bathroom to shower at night.

Friday, I drove to London today to look for New Age shops there… I was surprised as London has over 385,000 people, a far cry from the last time I visited it twenty-five years ago. I found one shop but the woman was pretty aloof. It was in the older part of the City on Dundas St. that had a little bit of everything going on, drugs, homeless people, prostitutes, gays, bikers, gangs and poor but also some affluent people.

When I got back from London, Marian told me that Gary had called her on the phone and told her that he wasn’t happy with me being there and wanted to know when I was leaving. She told him that I stayed a week last time but she didn’t know. He said that wasn’t acceptable and she told him that if he didn’t like it that he could move out. He told her that he’d out at the end of the month. He also complained that the fridge needed to be turned up because his beer wasn’t cold enough. She told him to stuff it. I told Marian of my plans to leave on Monday but that now, if he’s leaving and if she was still renting out the room, that I’d take it for a few months. She said that I was welcome to stay and so here I am… my new home …Woodstock Ontario