Elise Sereni Patkotak

Today I will miss my aunt’s pickled green tomatoes and the fried bread with some kind of flower in the middle that my family used to make for the July 4 picnic.  And I’ll miss all my aunts and uncles and mom and dad who were always part of the day.  But mostly, I’ll remember the summer I brought my friend Sandra home to meet my family. Sandra was, at the time, a 15 year old Eskimo girl.  Grandpop Rocco met her and in the thickest possible Italian accent said to her, “Welcome to my country!” I think that says

I told Mr. T that Aunt Judy was coming in just ten days. I know he got excited because he blinked.

Last week I was required to put makeup and a bra on two days in a row for some meetings. Here’s hoping this week is less stressful. Working out of my home definitely has some advantages…though the mailman may occasionally feel as though he wants to tear his eyes out.

Under the heading of music news on AOL is a story about Brittany Spears posing naked for some magazine. I guess I haven’t been paying attention for a while because I find myself wondering exactly how this is music news.  Does she play the banjo with her nipples?  Pound a drum with her butt?  Or is this just another desperate attempt by some “has been” to become an “is” again?

So now the newspapers tell me busts are out and butts are in for women.  Wouldn’t that figure since I have the Sereni curse – the deformed butt that shows up on the front of my body as though I were always seven months pregnant but is totally flat in the back.  Damn that J Lo!

First we were told to worry about our cholesterol numbers.  Then we were told to worry about our LDL and HDL – while apparently remembering simultaneously which was good, which was bad, which should be high, which should be low and what those numbers should be. Now we have to worry about some kind of small particles that can only be detected through a VAP test – a Vertical Auto Profile.  Seriously, at what point is enjoying a steak and just dying less trouble?

Oh get your minds out of the gutter.  I was refering to a good handyman and a good mechanic.  And once again, get your mind out of the gutter over the term “handyman”.  I have both and yet I still find myself with a headlight bulb for my car that I’m afraid to touch. I’m afraid to throw it away and I’m afraid to touch it.  I bought a new bulb for the one that had burned out. But my mechanic put both in that came in the package on the theory that the other would probably burn out in

I was visiting one of my kids at an institution here in town and brought him a taste of home – whale flipper.  Staff came in to try it. They asked questions about the food and the customs surrounding it.  My young friend knew little because his family had, to put it mildly, not been engaged in a subsistence lifestyle while he was growing up. I, on the other hand, was spewing out information like a frigging dictionary of whaling customs and habits. And I realized that I know more about Inupiaq whaling traditions and bowhead whales than I do