We're Stuck in Lodi, Too

Back before Saint Patrick's Day, when the unsolved mystery of that photo album I found pushed me to go hunting, one last time, for a living descendant in Ireland, I posed my quandary to a Facebook group of genealogical society members in County Cork.

When I mentioned I found the album five thousand miles from where it originated, one of the group members piped up, "So what's five thousand miles away?" When I informed this seasoned society member the answer to his question was a town called Lodi, California, he retorted with the inevitable: "Stuck in Lodi."

Yes, it's true: if anyone from that time frame remembers anything about the place, they remember the 1969 Creedence Clearwater Revival release by that same name.

Lodi, however, has a life of its own, separate and apart from that doubtful claim to fame. A city of about sixty five thousand, among other features, it sports a revitalized downtown which is finding its way amidst the exurbs of the more tony Bay area communities.

Right on the main street running through that downtown area sits the antique shop where I found the photograph album that turned out to belong to Harry and Alice Hawkes Reid of County Cork, Ireland. That's the shop where I returned, the other morning, to see if I could find an answer to my question of how the thing managed to get here from there.

The name of the place is Secondhand Rose. According to the shop's website, it has been in existence for twenty years, and has been established in the same location since 2000.

The difficulty—well, for me, at least—is that this is not just one shop. It is actually a collection of "shops," each the domain of a separate dealer. Right now, the store boasts forty five such dealers in their cooperative. And one of them—an unnamed one of them—is the person responsible for finding the album which eventually got sold to me. But I won't know anything more about the details unless this dealer decides to give me a call.

And so, I'm stuck, too—stuck in Lodi.

You know me: impatient. I want to know the answer now. But it's been two days since making my request, and I haven't heard a thing. I've even answered what turned out to be spam calls, all for the sake of not missing this caller from the antique dealers' secret society. Do you know how hard that is for me?! This is true dedication.

Meanwhile, it seems I may have an answer coming from a different direction. The person Heather had thought might know something about the album's journey to California has responded to my tentative plea via Facebook messenger. We are going to talk. Soon.

Photo courtesy Wren.