Selected Clips
Opening the door my grandparents shut when they left Ireland
Irish American Mary (McAleer) Novaria on her long journey to rediscover her Irish roots.
 |
| Mary's dad with his mum and sister in the early 1940s in Poughkeepsie, New York. |
We memorialized my father 20 years ago this St. Patrick’s Day.
“Oh, your father would have loved this,” more than a few people said. But I knew my father, who’d died four days prior from heart disease, likely would have been unmoved by sharing the occasion with Ireland’s patron saint.
The youngest son of immigrants and 40 years sober, he’d have rolled his eyes at the holiday many Americans use as an excuse to drink beer and paint themselves green, just as he did regarding New Year’s Eve, which he often proclaimed “amateur night.”
In the early 1970s, my dad took a brief interest in his McAleer roots, even procuring the family coat of arms to display in our suburban Chicago entry hall. A onetime Latin scholar, he frequently reminded my brothers and me of the family motto: Spectemur Agendo: Let us be judged by our deeds. That was the sum of his investment in our Irish heritage.
My mother, on the other hand, who chose March 17 for the service, spent part of that morning with a needle and thread mending the tricolor Irish flag we would hang by the front door for a reception following the service. She was Éirinn go Brách to the nth degree: Aran Island fisherman sweaters, shamrocks, breakfast tea, and Irish soda bread all the way.
Continue reading at Irish Central
 |
| Catherine McQueen via Getty Images |
Before COVID-19 made Zoom get-togethers de rigueur, I met one of my best friends in an online writers’ workshop. I’d cautioned my teenage daughter to be wary of online friendships when she’d first shown an interest in Facebook, but I had to backtrack on my warnings when “Samantha” came into my life.
Despite our 10-year age gap and a geographic divide that spanned the continental United States, Samantha and I clicked right away as we shared our writing, swapped page critiques and championed each other’s work. Before long, we dove into deep, personal territory, exchanging confidences and commiserations along with dinner recipes and designer finds from Home Goods.
Over the course of more than seven years, we cheered each other on through writing successes and family milestones like graduations and weddings. We bolstered each other through parental deaths, household moves and surgeries, shared celebrations and heartbreaks, vicarious travel and, well, life.
How many times did one of us tell the other how much we wished we could meet for coffee or a glass of wine? I always believed a meetup would happen eventually, but there were professional responsibilities, family crises and 2,500 miles between us. I was grateful for technology like iPhones, Messenger and Google Hangouts, which provided us with a virtual kitchen table. At some point, with our countless hours on the phone and constant stream of texts, I forgot Samantha and I had never actually been in the same room together.
An Unexpected Gift of Ginger
What an 80-Something Couple at the Grocery Store Taught My Husband and Me About Aging
Three years later, I still think about these strangers.
 |
| (iStock) |
