Elise Sereni Patkotak

My life is now complete. Continue reading →

we can invent hold music that doesn’t make you want to slit your wrists withing minutes of hearing it. Continue reading →

I know that it’s Christmas Eve. Doesn’t matter to me. Still feels like my world is crumbling around me. Three deaths of three people who were an important part of my life as various times in less than three weeks. It’s hard to just shake that off. Two of them carried some of the earliest memories of my childhood. The other carried the memories of being adults together.

Getting older means loss way too often. But when that loss hits you one right after the other, well, it really lays you back on your heels. So here’s hoping the rule Continue reading →

Seems like the ADN is no longer interested in my columns. So anything I write will be seen here and on Facebook. And now I won’t have to clean up my language.

And now I can’t get this to post. Sigh. Life was easier when we just used pen and paper.

I am not a holiday person. Not Christmas. Not New Year’s. Not my birthday. Not the Fourth of July. You get the picture. But here’s the thing. A lot of people don’t.

This is probably because my experience has been that most people do like holidays and like celebrating them. They cannot imagine not wanting to. But I don’t. And I’m not alone. I’m just brave enough to say it out loud for the world to hear. Most of us hide in the closet afraid to speak our true feelings because we will be mocked, at a minimum, and shunned Continue reading →

I arrived in Alaska after crying all the way up in the plane while my parrot cursed loudly at all that she had to endure with me. Here’s two pics. The first is me before I got to Alaska. The second is me weeks after arriving in Barrow. Those Barrow ladies really know how to sew.

There has been a lot of conversation over defined benefits packages for state employees. It seems to come from everyone except a person who is actually a beneficiary of that program. So here I am. I am a defined benefits retiree of the Alaska State system. You may pause now as you gasp at the thought of someone making that much free money from the state who is willing to say it out loud.

I don’t know about the rest of the retirees who are on the defined benefits package because I don’t see or hear much from any of Continue reading →

We should not be spending the summer watching our democracy fight for survival in November. So, let’s have some fun right here and now. Let’s compare what used to be to what is.

For instance, in 1960 a family entered the White House like no family ever before. They were so photogenic. She was so beautiful. The children were so cute. Their whole family played together. President Kennedy even hired his brother as his Attorney General – for those who have forgotten, it’s the original Robert Kennedy – you know, the one without a brain worm.

For a very brief Continue reading →

I arrived in Utkeagvik in 1972 to nurse at the Barrow Indian Health Service hospital. We weren’t a big facility. 13 beds plus one bed for pre and post delivery and a small area for babies. Our lab tech did x-rays and blood work and anything else they could throw at her. We all did everything else you could throw at us. We had to. There were only a couple flights a week in and out of town. There was no North Slope Borough or medivacs through the Borough’s Search and Rescue Department. And there was no blood bank that Continue reading →

Let’s get something straight from the start. I see nothing wrong in posting the Ten Commandments in a classroom – any classroom – though I would not want to be the teacher explaining to a kindergartner why they can’t covet their neighbor’s wife. While these commandments do not represent every culture in any given classroom anywhere in America, they do represent the general gist that most cultures provide in one manner or another on living together as a community in peace.

The Ten Commandments are not civil law except for a couple. If they were all the law, one of Continue reading →