Kohl’s
Published in Calliope Art & Literary Magazine
I’m five years-old shuffling my feet through Kohl’s with my dad. I’m scanning the aisles for new pajamas, but the task gets more difficult each time we make the trek to our favorite place to spend time together. I take these nights very seriously—it’s me and my dad “out on the town,” just the two of us. My dad works a lot, even I at five know that he works enough for me to notice. Still, once a month, after his exhausting days in the office, I get him all to myself. These evenings which really only last just shy of two hours seem to go on for days, and I love it that way.
The conversations with my dad make me laugh and think and dream and guess and plan all in the same breath. I usually pick out something pink or sparkly, but tonight I pick out something green and purple. It’s a set with pajama pants and a loose tank top with a swirl pattern on it. He nods and smiles, saying that’s perfect, Kens! I spot a pink robe with flower designs on it. I turn my head towards my dad, my eyes behind my purple glasses gleaming, a sly smirk on my lips. He laughs. Okay, fine—you can have both, he says. I wear the robe triumphantly around the store, and once we buy it, I don’t take it off for a week.
We sing Fleetwood Mac songs on the way home as the windows are down in his Chevy Tahoe. He’s a slow driver, but that’s good—all the more time I get to spend with him. When my mom asks why my hair is both streaming from and sticking out of my head, I gush about how dad let me pick out two things tonight and that dad rolled down the windows on the drive home and that dad put on “Go Your Own Way” and sang it with me as we drove around. Mom smiles.
Dad asks me to lunch with him. I show up a bit late and run across the street to the restaurant in my not-yet-broken-in Doc Martens, my heels yelling at me with every step. Fifteen years later, after the green and purple swirl pajamas and the pink flowered robe were pushed towards the back of my closet, I could not be more different; I am overworked, creatively drained, busier than ever, and I don’t wear pajama sets any longer—I usually just wear my Anaheim Ducks t-shirt and old dance team shorts. I stumble into the restaurant and place my sunglasses atop my messy hair as I search for him. I pull up the slipping straps of my sundress as the air conditioning chills me. I wave to my favorite server, who directs me over to Dad. I spot his collared shirt and clean haircut from across the room. I smile as I sit down in the booth, muttering I’m so sorry, to which he says, It’s okay girl! I was just responding to emails. I look to the edge of the table and see papers. Dad catches my eyes and says he has articles printed out and annotated for me to read. They’re about how to build a better morning routine and how to find stillness in times of panic. His handwriting covers the pages, underlined, exclamation point-ed and smiley-face-ed.
As we grow further away from each other because we have less and less time to spend together, we have to rely on these lunches or in-passing kitchen conversations or meetings halfway between Orange and my hometown to hold us together. These are our modern-day Kohl’s nights. I realize that these annotated articles are the new currency of love, the new green and purple swirl pajamas and pink flowered robe.
My Marys
Published in Calliope Art & Literary Magazine
Spaghetti, a side of zucchini, and garlic toast was my great grandmother’s sacred meal. We ate it as a family on the first night of each lake house trip, laughing and conversing as our sunburned faces had spots of spaghetti sauce on them. This meal signified the suspension of the buzz of everyday life for the coming days in the mountains. My great grandmother always sat at the end of the long dining room table with a napkin tucked into the collar of her shirt so her outfit wouldn’t get stained. She’d sit there smiling at us all throughout dinner, intently listening to our troubles and triumphs.
My great grandparents Chuck and Mary Therese Chodzko bought a small house in Lake Arrowhead, California in the 70s. In the 90s they tore down the house and turned it into a home where every member of their expanding family had space to rest. Mary Therese put a sign above the front door that read “maison des'enfants”, which translates to “house of the children”. In the coming years, that would ring true—as of now, Mary Therese has 15 grandchildren and 27 (and counting) great grandchildren.
Being the wonderful Irish Catholic woman she was, Mary Therese put a white statue of the Blessed Mother in her classic form—hands gently outstretched with her veil cascading down her shoulders— in the corner of the backyard in between flowerbeds. She watched over as our massive family spent hours there together for over thirty years. The Blessed Mother statue was a representation of what it meant to be in this family— you loved as she loved, fought as she fought, and had the tenacity that she had in all the tough times.
Under sad circumstances, we had to sell Mary Therese and Chuck’s Lake Arrowhead house and leave behind its spaghetti dinners and floral bedspreads and sepia-tinted memories in 2017. My extended family and I went up to spend one last weekend in the house and packed up all the extra things that were left behind. I did one last tearful walk-through of the house and looked towards the backyard. There stood the Blessed Mother statue, worn by years of mountain weather, cracked in some spots from stray pinecones falling on her as the seasons changed, not-so-white anymore from all the time spent outside, but still as beautiful and as treasured as ever. I dusted off some spiderwebs, awkwardly leaned down to pick Mary up, and took her into the house with me.
“We’re taking Mary with us, mom.” I said.
“We can’t fit her in the car—”
“We’ll make her fit.”
So, there Mary sat for the whole drive back down the mountain towards home, just standing with her palms outstretched in the middle of the car. She seemed large and powerful standing there. I stared at her, sort of off-put by her sudden presence.
~
The Blessed Mother, the Virgin Mary, Mother of Jesus, the namesake of the song “Ave Maria”—whatever you want to call her, that’s her. The Biblical Mary went through many trials throughout her life. Keeping with Catholic tradition, an angel came to Mary and asked her to be the mother of Jesus. It’s written that she was around 15 at the time, and still, she said yes with complete trust. Growing up in the Catholic Church, I always found that strength to be shocking, yet admirable. Of course, the hardest thing Mary had to endure was watching her child die before her eyes. In consensus with the Bible, she stood there at the foot of the cross as Jesus was being crucified. People said disgusting things as he carried the cross, mocking the wood he hung from, and there Mary endured. Once Jesus had died, the men left, but the women stayed. The Gospel of John says,
“So the soldiers did this. But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, and Mary Magdalene.”
There is no further mention of Jesus’s disciples at the crucifixion in any of the Gospels after that verse. The Bible states that it was the women who followed Jesus the whole way up to the place of the crucifixion, the women who stood and watched as he died, and the women who prepared Jesus’s body for burial. The strength of a woman is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. I know that to be true through the Blessed Mother, with the women in my family, and most especially with Mary Therese.
Like the Blessed Mother, my Mary Therese went through more trials than most, and still had unbelievable strength through them all. She went to college, unlike most women of her time, and became a teacher. She married Chuck Chodzko, had four kids, and stopped teaching. Mary Therese started to feel different as the years with four kids went by. She couldn’t get out of bed and lost the desire to do anything in her life. She talked to Chuck, and he thought she should go back to work to get her out of her depression and anxiety.
Mary Therese returned to work as a teacher and felt massively fulfilled. My great grandparents heard a lot of talk from the neighbors because Chuck had “let” her work. He had always been a progressive man, and teaching was helping his wife immensely. Mary Therese dealt with depression and anxiety every day for the rest of her life, but you would never know it if you didn’t know her. She would wake up, put on her matching pantsuit, take the curlers out of her hair, swipe on her rose-colored lipstick, get down to business teaching, then would tend to her children and the crosses they carried.
Like Mary, she watched her children go through numerous traumatic events. She sat there, at the foot of her children’s crosses, watching as horrific accidents and a nasty divorce and a few gut-wrenching deaths hung her children and grandchildren on their crosses. She never judged her children for their crosses, never made them feel less than, never shamed them for their reactions to their crosses, wiped their blood, cleaned their wounds, and kept them going.
Like all good mothers know, you can’t carry your children’s crosses for them. You can’t pick up that splintering wood and drag it up the hill for them while still carrying yours. It doesn’t work that way. Mary Therese and the Blessed Mother knew that. They did what they could until it was simply time to stop doing. Mary Therese aided her children and grandchildren more times than I can count, once being when her son got in a car accident that left him without speech, without the ability to walk, and with his law career as he knew it completely over. She sat there at the edge of his bed every day, praying the rosary, and holding his hand. She said those Hail Mary’s over and over for weeks on end. Her hands never left her rosary beads, even as she watched as her son regain speech, the ability to walk, and the ability to practice law again.
In the early 80’s, my grandmother’s husband left her for good with three kids under five years old. Mary Therese dedicated literal years to helping my grandmother get her life back. If my grandmother was panicked and needed her at 2 A.M., Mary Therese would get in the car and drive to her house to hold her while she cried. Her family was so special to her that we were worth doing anything for—she called all of us special, and I can still hear her saying to me,
“You’re my very special girl. You know that, right?”
~
I often wonder how I can emulate the Marys that have always been figures in my life. How can I stand through the difficulties others in my life are going through, just as Mary stood through Jesus’s death? If Mary Therese can show up for her children as they carried their crosses, how can I show up for my loved ones and watch them carry theirs?
The white, cracked statue of the Blessed Mother that Mary Therese placed so lovingly in the backyard of her Lake Arrowhead home made it back home with my family. She stands in the corner of my family’s backyard now, her palms open, facing towards the pool next to her. My cousins jump in that pool now, washing the dirt off the statue with the splashed chlorine. She sometimes gets hit with one of my brothers’ stray footballs from them playing catch next to her. “Sorry Mary!!” they say.
Now that my Mary Therese has been gone around six years, it’s sometimes hard to feel where she is. She had dementia for the last few years of her life, and it was crushing to see our matriarch slowly start to slip away. Despite the dementia, there wasn’t a day that Mary Therese didn’t have on a matching set, earrings, lipstick, blush, and curlers. I’d go to visit with her whenever I could and she’d always greet me with,
“Oh, there’s my McKenna! My special girl!”
I’d lean down to hug her, feeling her loose Irish skin against my cheek. There was almost always blush, lipstick, or perfume transferred from her skin to mine, but that was the best part. It was like a remnant of someone I loved. A parting gift I could take with me.
~
On the day of her funeral, I smiled as I saw Mary Therese’s picture with a flower wreath around it. There were children everywhere, running around and playing tag on the grass patch outside the cemetery, but that’s how it always was at “maison des'enfants”. Mary Therese would’ve loved that. I like to think she’s up “there” somewhere, hanging out with THE Mary, telling her about the multitudes of grandchildren she keeps an eye on all day long. Or they’re exchanging spaghetti recipes. I have yet to decide.