Elise Sereni Patkotak

The eventual upshot of some columns you’ll be reading here over the next few months will be a new picture accompanying the column.  Up till now, I have resisted having a new picture taken not because I have aged but because I’d become extremely overweight.

So I’ve spent the past ten years or so ducking from cameras. If family or business obligations forced me to be in a picture, I made sure I was standing behind someone, anyone, who could hide my ever spreading girth.

A little over a year ago I decided that I could no longer hide behind

I recently had to go out of town for some surgery.  I needed a place to stay between the time of surgery and the day I could return to Alaska.  I stayed with an old friend, Janis.

On the day of the surgery, I came down with the flu. We didn’t know this till I came out of surgery and was quite ill with symptoms that obviously had nothing to do with the procedure.  After almost crying when the doctor told me he wanted to keep me in the hospital for an extra day, he finally agreed to discharge me

I’m what you’d call animal friendly.  Or, as my accountant puts it every year when he looks at my charitable deductions, “Aren’t there any people that you want to help?”

My animals are my family. They are my companions, my dear friends and my confidantes.  But here’s what they aren’t.  They aren’t human.  Even I know that.

This means that if someone is going to be in charge, it should usually be me if only because I’m the only one with the opposable thumb needed to dial 911 in an emergency.  It also means that I am responsible for their

My sister and the three cousins, Christopher, Michael and Joe III, are out hiking.  My cousin Toni is upstairs cooking. She’s already cleaned the celery, made sugar free cookies and is now baking potatoes so they’ll be ready to become part of tomorrow’s breakfast.  It wouldn’t be an Italian household if one of the women weren’t in the kitchen at all times.

Her husband Rich is struggling with a recalcitrant screen door that has refused to glide smoothly for over four years.  It will either glide smoothly for him or it will be sorry it didn’t.

I sit at my

I belong to an organization called the Alaska Parrot Education and Adoption Center (AkPEAC). This group has, at times, been referred to as the bird Nazis.  There’s a reason they have that reputation.  It’s well deserved and well earned.

With PEAC, birds and their welfare trump all other factors.  Which means that well-meaning people who want to adopt or foster a bird find themselves facing almost more training sessions and evaluations than people who want to adopt or foster children. 

I bought my first bird in 1970 from a department store in Brooklyn.  Not much was known about parrots back

The parish church that formed the nexus of my childhood life, and the center of my parents’ lives till they died, will be celebrating its 100th anniversary this fall.  St. Michael’s Roman Catholic Church and Grade School in the Ducktown section of Atlantic City is throwing itself a big party and inviting the old neighborhood to reunite for an evening of reminiscences, laughter and, of course, food.

Unfortunately, because the affair is being held in a hotel, the food won’t be as good as it was when the women of the neighborhood would gather in the kitchen beneath the stage

Am I the only one getting more and more annoyed at the fact that I pay to go see a movie and then have to watch commercials?  It’s bad enough I have to sit through trailers of movies I’d never go to see with the sound track jacked up to ear deafening level. But then they have the nerve to actually show commercials.  The same commercials I see on TV, only writ large against a big screen they seem twice as obnoxious.

Not only can’t I get up for a bathroom break or to let the dog out or to

I was raised by parents who had been raised in the Great Depression. My mother’s family was lucky. Her dad owned a grocery store and even in the Great Depression people had to eat. But through her whole life my mother carried the memory of neighbors coming into the store with government coupons for food and the look of humiliation on their faces as they quietly slipped the papers to her dad.

My dad’s mom responded to the Great Depression by pulling him out of school and putting him to work.  The excuse she used then, and the excuse still

A few days ago, I received a call from a stranger. He said he’d found my phone number on a check that had been inadvertently left behind at a store in the Dimond Center.  Apparently the young man to whom I had issued the check had forgotten it on the counter there.

The young man’s mother is currently searching for the aliens who sucked most of his brains out when he hit his teens. She’s pretty sure that has to be the reason for such a major lapse on his part.  Or, she suggested, he was just being 16.

The

This past May I received a check in the mail from an advertising company for an Internet telephone book. The check was for about $3.  Being the competent businesswoman that I am, I looked at the check and wondered why I didn’t’ remember ever signing up for the service.

I read the front carefully to make sure it was an actual check and not one of those fake checks that you send back to the company and they give you that much credit if you buy the service. But no, it was a legitimate check.

I endorsed it, cashed it