Mary Novaria

Published at Mary's dad with his mum (right) 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 ...

Mary (left) and Catharine at my parents wedding in 1958. My parents named me after my two grandmothers, Mary and Catharine. I have no memories of my paternal grandmother Mary, who died before I was 2 years old, but Catharine, my mother’s mother, was my beloved Grammy. For most of my childhood we lived a thousand miles from her, but she visited for weeks-long stretches during many summers and occasionally over Christmas. A few times we road-tripped from Chicago to Boston to see Grammy, my mom’s siblings and my cousins. Grammy loved to get mail. “Just write and tell me you went uptown and got a stick of gum,” she’d say. So I would and she’d write back, always slipping in a few dollars she probably couldn’t afford, the same way she did with birthday cards. Regrettably, I didn’t save the letters, but I recently came across one she’d written to my mom. Isn’t the national campaign crazy? Just now, I think that the best candidate for the Presidency is Robert ...

Get the Picture? A Father's Legacy and the Love of Art BY MARY NOVARIA June 17, 2016 Published by The Good Men Project My dad was a first generation Irish-American who grew up playing stickball on the streets of New York. His father, a laborer from County Tyrone, had an 8 th  grade education, never took his family to a museum, and didn’t play classical music in the home. The radio, which was considered a luxury, was for listening to “Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy” and the New York Giants baseball games. My father was in his 30s before going to the top of the Empire State building—he took out-of-town guests—and was well into adulthood before he was exposed to the treasures that lay behind the doors of MoMA or The Met. Click here to continue reading... I'm Not Sally Draper But I Could've Been BY MARY NOVARIA March 27, 2015    Published by the Huffington Post             ...