Elise Sereni Patkotak

All together now, hats off and one big Alaska hurrah to Matralle Morton of Jacksonville, Texas.  She’s the intrepid tourist who, with just a can of diet Dr. Pepper and a lot of moxie, foiled a carjacker here in Anchorage last week. Matralle has single-handedly proven that size (she’s 5’4″) and age (65) are meaningless when you have a cold can of Diet Dr. Pepper in your hand and legs too short to jump out of a moving vehicle.

This perhaps impacted me more than normally this week since I was in the middle of scanning through my AARP magazine.

As a displaced native of the great megalopolis that stretches from Boston to Washington DC, I believe I am uniquely qualified to speak to the issue of traffic in our fair city.  Especially since I also spent 30 years in Barrow where a traffic jam meant someone’s dog was crossing the street and you had to wait till it got to the other side, which inevitably resulted in at least a three car backup at the town’s main stop sign.

Life, however, has gotten busier in Alaska. Barrow now actually has something that can, if you look at it sideways

I didn’t know Jay Hammond personally.  After reading the paper and listening to the radio this past week, I can see where that was definitely my loss. But Jay Hammond still managed to influence my life, one of the many he probably influenced without ever knowing it. It was the mid to late 1970s. I was a newly minted bureaucrat for the North Slope Borough’s Health Department.  I was heading to Anchorage for a meeting and with me on the trip was Mary Edwardsen.  Mary was a Barrow lady, one of those Inupiaq women who made the Mother’s Club a

Well, they’re at it again. The American Dental Association is now running ads on TV asking Governor Murkowski to stop the provision of what they term second class dental care to Alaska Natives.  The ad claims that the same unfeeling bureaucrats who have ignored Native dental care needs for years are now proposing second class care as the solution to this long standing problem.

There are so many things wrong with this ad that it’s hard to know where to begin. But let’s start with the fact that it isn’t faceless bureaucrats who are proposing a dental health aide system

Saturday was one of those perfect days in Anchorage.  The sun was shinning, there was a nice breeze and summer still seemed to stretch forever in front of us.  Even the mosquitoes took a day off to just laze around and enjoy the antics at the dog jog in Kincaid Park.

I was there with the Parrot Education and Adoption Center. I had my two foster birds and my very own African Grey, Abdul.  They all seemed to enjoy the warmth, noise, dogs and attention.  Abdul in particular thought it was all quite amusing and couldn’t look in enough places

Back in the 70s, not long after I’d arrived in Alaska, a social worker from Indian Health Service invited me to go on a road trip with her to Denali National Park.  I hadn’t seem much of Alaska on my way to Barrow so I was more than amenable to discovering some of the beauty of my newly adopted state.

The drive to Denali – or McKinley as it was then known – was truly a drive into the wilderness in the 70s.  If you didn’t pay attention, you were in Fairbanks long before you realized you’d passed the one

I try to limit the amount of caffeine in my system on any given day for the sake of those around me.  Given that one drop too much, I become intensely manic, and not at all in the good sense of the word.  I have the attention span of a gnat when over-caffeinated and can’t put two sentences together without thinking of something else that I need to absolutely do at just that moment.

That is why this column has been on my computer for three days now being painfully scratched out two to three sentences at a time. In

I took my dog for a walk the day the bombs hit in London.  I felt sadder than I had in a long time.  I’ve always been a bit of a fanatic about England.  Charles Dickens is my favorite author, closely followed by Jane Austin, Thackeray and all the Bronte’s. I am a charter subscriber to a magazine called British Heritage and I actually read each issue cover to cover.

One of the best afternoons of my life was spent at Old Bailey in London attending the murder trial of a man who was a British Hell’s Angel. I loved

Under the general heading of “What Were They Thinking?” I offer you Purple Haze, Acapulco Gold and Rasta.  No, not pot. That would at least make some sense, as they are names familiar to many of my generation for various kinds of marijuana.  No, these are actually the names of pot-flavored lollipops apparently being offered for sale in some convenience stores in this country.

Now before I go any further with this, let me indulge in a little full disclosure. I’ve smoked pot.  Many times.  And to all of you out there looking shocked and acting so self-righteous, I can

I am usually a peace loving person. Call it a throwback to my youth in the sixties. Yet if the carnage of last week didn’t prove it to me, the carnage from this week did. I have changed.  In fact, I will have to repaint my whole house this fall to get rid of the evidence of this summer’s mass slaughter of mosquitoes on its walls. Red streaks are everywhere. Tiny screams of death can be heard echoing throughout the universe.

Each night before I go to bed, I do battle with these mighty warriors. I wander through my house