Stuck in Lodi

Just started putting on Pandora after one too many frustrating experiences with random play on my IPod - Ramona and Beezus books or Charles Bukowski poems interrupting my Beck groove; Christmas songs sung by country singers sending me into inexplicable sudden panic.  Pandora is fun because you enter an artist that represents the mood you're in and see what the anonymous Pandora people think of you.  This morning I put on the Bruno Mars channel and greatly cheered up a cranky Monday-morning seven year old.  Jon said, "How'd you get the pre-show music list from the Nickelodeon show we're taping?"  It's true - from Bruno Mars to One Direction to Maroon Five - it was all the music the second-fifth grade crowd is rocking.  When I got home from dropping S at school and a quick trip to Trader Joe's, I chose the Jakob Dylan station.  Pandora always starts with a song from the actual artist and basically, I just wanted to hear that scratchy sexy voice.  Oh Jakob Dylan what you do to me.  I got some Ben Harper, okay, some Iron and Wine, getting a little folksy for my mood, and then a cover of Lodi, the 1969 Creedence Clearwater Revival song that I just love.  I didn't really ever listen to the lyrics before - "Oh lord, stuck in Lodi again," and this time it made me do a little research.  It's about Lodi, California, an agricultural town about 70 miles from Fogerty's hometown of Berkeley (or so claims Wikipedia) and the feeling of a broke musician being stuck there.  I remember a Lodi, New Jersey that's pretty arm-pitty too.  I mostly know it as the place with the big DMV near the town where I got my tattoo in the early 90s - Wayne, New Jersey.  Wayne had the big fountain store (right across the street from Schatzi's Tattoos) that was made famous by the band Fountains of Wayne and the scene in the Sopranos in which Tony buys a fountain from the police officer he's had fired.  It's a great disturbing classic scene.

I have to change the channel now.  I have an aversion to Jack Johnson.  I just can't believe it's music for adults.  Switch over to the Dayna Kurtz station and hear my friend.  I'm sure she's not making any money off it.  God she's good.  She's so good.  Buy all her CDs:  www.daynakurtz.com

S didn't want to go to school this morning.  It was a classic rocking weekend with a daddy/daughter fishing trip, baseball, family hanging...I'm hoping this is just a normal Monday morning thing, but I'm having a rising anxiety about her resistance to school.  I'm pondering the concept of homeschooling.  I'm fantasizing that if we were in Western Mass it would all be different.  I'm internalizing her discomfort.  I'm visualizing her slumped shoulders as she walks into the classroom.  What is going on?  When I talk to her about individual subjects - music, math, PE - she says she likes them all.  When I ask about her teacher, she says she loves her.  It seems to be interpersonal, social, something about feeling overwhelmed being with 20 kids every day.  I imagine it's overwhelming.  I've never enjoyed being in a big office and having to deal with a myriad of different personalities.  And at the very least I had a cubicle to retreat into.

I have to turn my focus now to a training I'm doing tonight for parents at S's school to lead class groups, help them build community, learn how to problem solve, grow empathy, all that good stuff.  I led a community circle with last year's third graders and loved watching them begin to open up, listen to each other, solve problems with more respect.  Tonight I'll train a crew so we have one parent per class.  Paring down some of the confusing and overly groovy materials from the program we initially used, making it more user-friendly, developmentally-appropriate, and just plain fun.  We shall see.  I breathe deep, remind myself that it's only week two of third grade and that children struggle with going to school and no one loves it all the time and that's ok.  And that this could just be transition time.  I listen to a little more Wallflowers.  It shoots me back into a time in my early twenties when it wasn't that I was happy, exactly, but I was responsible for no one but myself.  I didn't always do a great job of taking care of me, but the worry about that was different, more existential, less heartbreaking.  Ahhhh..Angel on my Bike.  His voice is a salve to me.  S will find her own salves.  I can help her, but I can't do it for her.  That may be the most excruciating part of parenthood.