Elise Sereni Patkotak

Well, Thanksgiving is here and that means the holiday season now goes into full swing.  Tis the time of year when we overeat overspend and act as though eggnog was an entire food group.  Sadly, it is also the only time of year some of us remember those less fortunate who depend on the kindness of strangers to make their way in life.

I tend to be a “Bah! Humbug!” kind of person during the holiday season.  Before my mother died, she and I had a conversation about that. I told her that what made me crazy about this season

I grew up in a time when all parents felt very safe in telling their children to always look for a policeman if they were scared or lost.  A policeman, we were told, would always be our friend.

This was never necessarily true in Bush Alaska.  The police that were there – whether state troopers or city police – were usually outsiders brought in to enforce state and federal laws that may or may not have made a lot of sense to the local population within their cultural parameters.

A great example of this was an incident that occurred many

So I see from the paper that Barrow Cable TV is about to be purchased by GCI. That means that Barrow will be wired to the world at an even quicker rate than it already is.  Instead of listening to my Barrow friends complaining about slow dial up to the Internet and endless waits while downloading pictures of the latest cute things my animals did, they will have access to cable modem.  Now they won’t have an excuse to not comment on how wonderful my little flock looks.

When I first arrived in Barrow in 1972, they didn’t even have

Sometime back two decades or so ago when I stilled lived in Barrow, I made a great ceremony out of tossing my last pair of pantyhose into the trash and declaring my body pantyhose free for the rest of my life. I did this out of a sense of duty to every woman who has ever walked down the street with her pantyhose twisting around her knees, the crotch sagging lower than a teenager’s levis.

Along with the pantyhose went the idea of ever again wearing a heel that in any way came to a point or a pair of

I don’t know if words could ever do justice to the scene at Bally’s Park Place Casino and Hotel where St. Michael’s Church of Atlantic City held it’s 100th Anniversary gala.  How do you describe 1000 people in a ballroom, almost all Italian, screaming and laughing with joy and tears as they run into classmates from grade school they hadn’t seen in 50 years?  Or old boyfriends who brought back the memory of being very young and innocent in a time when the young had the privilege of being innocent? Or the girlfriend who had a wall of Ricky Nelson

Having made the decision to have gastric bypass surgery, gotten the support of all the health care providers who kept me alive all these years, and passed the innumerable tests required before the surgery, I felt as though anything else I had to do for the surgery would be easy by comparison.  It had taken me over a year to traverse the pre-op road and now I was finally at surgery’s door – good health awaited me on the other side.  The only issue left to resolve was insurance pre-approval.

Ah how innocent we so often are when we find

When I was a young girl, my world was fairly small and tightly controlled.  Nothing was done without the express written consent of parents, priests and nuns.  This led to some very interesting situations in my childhood for both me and some of my neighborhood companions.

For instance, there was the time my friend Grace got appendicitis while we were still in grade school. She wasn’t about to tell our nun that she had this pain because she didn’t want to miss school. By the time we got out that day, I literally had to help her down the stairs

Someone recently asked me if I felt that the work I do as a Guardian Ad Litem (GAL) actually “saved” any children.  I asked them to define “saved”.  They responded that they would define it as taking children out of a bad situation and returning them to a healthy one, either with their healed family or a new family.  Then they added, “And these kids grow up ok and become productive, healthy members of society.”

They had me nodding yes until we got to that last part.  Children in state custody often don’t arrive there until an awful lot of

When I moved from Barrow to Anchorage, one of the first things I did was become a volunteer at the Bird Treatment and Learning Center (Bird TLC). I did it because all my life I have felt a special love and affinity towards birds.

I remember as a child dreaming that I was Supergirl. After my mother would put the lights out in my room at night, I would lull myself to sleep dreaming that I was leaping out of the little window in my bedroom. My super powers allowed me to zoom straight up thereby missing the wall that

About a month ago, I wrote a column in which I detailed my growing realization that I either needed to get control over my weight or I would not be able to fulfill my late life goal of spending all of my niece’s inheritance before I die.  After much thought, a lot of Internet research, and a couple of bags of potato chips, I finally decided that a gastric bypass was the only solution left to me.

Armed with the support of the many doctors in this community who helped to keep me alive until I reached this decision, I