I grew up with Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree." I knew the song. I knew the movie. I knew about Alice and Ray living in the old church and Arlo getting himself into trouble because of a large quantity of garbage.
This becomes relevant.
I met Jenny at Castaways, a dive bar in Rockford that my brother and I owned. She came in with a group of women who were organizing the Rockford Rage Roller Derby, and I believe she was something like the fifth woman to join the league. Castaways became their unofficial headquarters for a while, and Jenny was one of the people who started turning up regularly.
I didn't know it then, but our orbits were on a collision course for the next fourteen years.
After Castaways closed its doors, I was between lives. Jenny had done some posters for the Rage, and I remembered liking them, so one day I contacted her on MySpace.
This was when contacting someone on MySpace was a perfectly reasonable thing for an adult to do.
I told her I was working on a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z and asked if she might be interested in illustrating it. "Working on" is probably generous. I had an idea for a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z, which is not exactly the same thing as having a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z.
Less than a week later, Jenny sent me an illustration for the first poem.
"A is for Asparagus."
It was perfect.
This presented me with an immediate problem because now I actually had to write the book.
So I did.
Jenny and I began spending more time together, and eventually I learned that she and her husband Dan lived in an old Lutheran church in Pecatonica, Illinois.
The first time I walked into the place, I knew immediately that I had entered Alice's Restaurant.
Not metaphorically. I mean there was the church.
It still had its stained-glass windows. It still had a stage at the front where sermons, performances, announcements and whatever else Lutheran congregations do from stages had once emanated. The building was enormous, but Jenny and Dan essentially lived in only two areas of it. Most of the rest of the building was still just this cavernous old church surrounding the relatively small portion where two people were actually conducting their lives.
And I had seen this movie.
I knew where this kind of thing could lead.
At first the similarities were amusing. Arlo had Alice and Ray living in a church. I had Jenny and Dan living in a church. There were artists and unconventional people involved. There was a general feeling that ordinary residential architecture had somehow been rejected as insufficient for the situation.
Then I learned another little detail.
Arlo Guthrie and Alice Brock had written a children's book together, Mooses Come Walking.
Jenny and I were writing a children's book together.
Now, I am willing to tolerate a certain amount of coincidence from the universe. You have to. Otherwise you start becoming the kind of person who finds messages intended specifically for you in the license plates of passing automobiles.
So I let that one go.
Eventually Jenny invited me over to mow the lawn.
This is one of those sentences that doesn't sound particularly important when you say it, but in retrospect there aren't that many people in your life whose lawn you begin mowing at an abandoned Lutheran church.
Shortly after Jenny and I had become very close, Dan, who had been the city manager of Pecatonica, got a job in the oil industry in Houston. They were moving to Texas, and they were moving fast.
So fast, in fact, that they hired me to clean out the church.
This is where anyone familiar with "Alice's Restaurant" should begin experiencing some concern on my behalf.
There was a lot of stuff in that church.
Some of it had apparently been sitting in the basement for decades. There were books. There was paperwork. There was glassware. There were assorted objects whose usefulness had expired so long ago that nobody was quite sure what their usefulness had originally been. Much of it was already moldy and unpleasant before I ever touched it.
I hauled it out.
And hauled it out.
And hauled it out.
Eventually I had everything that needed to go outside, bagged and ready for the city to collect.
Jenny and Dan were headed for Houston. The church was cleaned out. My work was finished.
Except it wasn't.
Because a thunderstorm came through.
The rain soaked the garbage.
Now, garbage that has been sitting in the basement of an old Lutheran church for several decades is not improved by the addition of water. Nobody has ever opened a bag containing moldy paperwork, old books and miscellaneous church debris, poured several gallons of rainwater into it and said, "There. Much better."
The city of Pecatonica took one look at the situation and declined to take the garbage.
It would have to be rebagged.
And this was the moment when the universe stopped being subtle.
I had grown up listening to "Alice's Restaurant." I knew exactly what happened when Arlo Guthrie had to get rid of the garbage from Alice's church. I had been aware of the parallels from the first time I walked into Jenny's church.
But up until this point, they had been cute.
Now I was being sent back to a church to deal with a municipal garbage problem.
There are billions of people on Earth. Most of them will live their entire lives without having this experience.
I drove back to Pecatonica.
I bought industrial garbage bags.
And I spent about half a day taking decades worth of rain-soaked, moldy Lutheran garbage and putting it into new bags so the city would agree to haul it away.
No police officers arrived.
I was not arrested.
There were no aerial photographs.
There were no twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows.
Nobody asked me whether I had rehabilitated myself.
I just rebagged the garbage.
Eventually the city took it away.
As far as I know, this leaves Arlo Guthrie and me as two of the very few people in American history who have found themselves involved in a complicated garbage-disposal situation arising from an old church occupied by unconventional people, with the added coincidence that both situations somehow involved children's books.
Arlo got a song and a movie out of his.
I got Atrocious Poems A to Z.
Jenny spent the next two years in Houston. When she returned, we began our life together. So unlike the movie, this wasn't the end of anything. It was the beginning.
But before any of that could happen, the garbage had to be picked up.
And apparently, if you live in an old church, there's only one kind of person you should call when that happens.
Arlo Guthrie wasn't available.
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