Elise Sereni Patkotak

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

When I first moved down from Barrow to Anchorage and realized the size of the yard for which I was responsible, I panicked a little.  In Barrow, being responsible for a yard meant making sure the dead car, two partial skidoos and sundry pieces of what once had been an ATM were neatly stacked. In Anchorage, it was clear that maintaining a yard would involve green living things.

A friend assured me that as time went by I would become more and more comfortable with my yard, until I reached the point where I couldn’t wait for spring to arrive

There’s an old joke we used to tell on Anchorage when I lived in the bush. We’d say that Anchorage was as close as you could get to Alaska without actually being there. The more complaints I read in the paper about the moose and bears we share our world with here, the more I realize that maybe that wasn’t a joke.

I moved to Alaska from the most urbanized part of America – that great megalopolis that starts in Boston and ends in Washington D.C.  The only wildlife you see along that corridor are the deer eating on the

I traveled to Barrow last week for high school graduation.  My friend Greta was graduating and, after sitting through innumerable grade school Christmas pageants in which she was only visible as the ponytail in the back row, I wanted to be front and center for her final bow in the Barrow school system. It was a Barrow graduation which meant it went on for three hours in the high school gym with little kids running around, a constant flow of traffic in and out of the gym and a procession by the graduates to the rhythm of Eskimo drums while

Remember that picture of Nick Nolte taken a couple of years ago after what can only have been a six-month, non-stop bender?  Remember any number of pictures of Courtney Love or Robert Downey, Jr.?

Now think about Rush Limbaugh. Have you ever seen a picture of him where he looked anything but well put together and sober?  And yet he had a major drug problem.

These thoughts run through my mind because I recently had surgery that necessitated a few days of drugs for the pain following it. I don’t do well on prescription pain meds.  So I spent the

An inspector general’s report came out recently that claims that passenger screening at airports is no better today than it was 17 years ago. On reading the report, Oregon Rep. Peter DeFazio said, “The inadequacies and loopholes in the system are phenomenal.’’

According to a news report on the web recently, “The inspector general’s report, as well as a study by the GAO, portrayed the TSA as an unresponsive, inflexible bureaucracy that is failing to provide an adequate level of security at airports.” Again, according to this news story, Inspector General Clark Kent Ervin “told lawmakers the TSA screeners and

Up on the North Slope, we never met a bond proposition we didn’t like.  In 30 years of voting there, during 25 of which there were always bond propositions on the ballot, every one of them passed with flying colors.  If some bond proposition only got 65% approval, that was viewed as close to failing.

As in Anchorage, property taxes are the mail fuel of local government there and the backbone for financing the payback of bond sales.  Unlike Anchorage, however, on the North Slope we had industry property at Prudhoe Bay that fed hundreds of millions of dollars to

There was a death in Barrow recently and my friend Big Jim sent me this description of the community preparing the gravesite:

“Well we dug the grave for Leland today.  We had plenty of cousins and his brother Sam to help us. It was a true arctic grave dig.  The auger was there compliments of the City of Barrow, and BUECI provided Jeff Larson to operate it as usual.

“There were about 10 guys standing there clearing the dirt with 25 mph winds taking the chill factor down to -40.  The snow was whipping along the ground and then streaming