Elise Sereni Patkotak

Maybe I’m a little extra sensitive about immigration issues because my family was so recently immigrants to this country.

Having spent most of my life living in areas rich with cultures other than middle class white America, I find that the multi hued colors of Brooklyn’s streets, the gruff accents of the Inupiaq language and the heady smells of a walk through Little Italy in South Philly have always described America to me as much as, if not more than, a suburban neighborhood with neatly mowed lawns and trimmed hedges. 

In order to get a true picture of America today,

It’s something of a running joke among my friends that when they visit me they bring coats and sweaters because they claim I keep my house too cold.  When winter approaches, their sweaters become more bulky and mittens appear as they try to stave off frostbite during the bridge game.

My attitude is that as long as my three parrots and cockatoo are ok, my friends shouldn’t complain. After all, my birds come from warm tropical climes and surely would be the first to suffer the bad effects of excessive cold.

Since my birds have probably never actually experienced the

My mother had a habit of waiting till 11 PM to call me so she could get the night rate. She continued this habit for most of the thirty years I was in Barrow and she was in Atlantic City.

So, unless it was me calling her, our calls took place while she was falling asleep in her chair in front of the TV. In fact, as she aged, the main topic of these particular phone conversations would be how sleepy she was and how hard it had been to wait up till 11 PM to call me.  She would

Every time I turn on the TV or radio or read a newspaper recently, I find some politician or community or civic leader urging America to get back to normal.  Well, having seen normal in America, I’m not so sure that is something to which we should necessarily aspire.

In case you don’t remember, before the attack on the twin towers, we’d spent the summer with our noses deep into Gary Condit’s smelly and somewhat suspect psyche.  So going back to normal may not really be all it’s cracked up to be.

As these thoughts wandered around my brain looking

I was in Barrow for a children’s hearing when the planes hit the twin towers of the World Trade Center. For the first time in my entire career as a GAL, I was happy to have the hearing as a diversion.  The alternative would have been to sit in front of the TV hour after hour, staring at the scenes of chaos and devastation visited on a city I know and love so well.

I was young in New York City.  I was just out of school, working my first job and feeling as though the world was mine and

Ah food – glorious food.  Whether it is dried fish, raw whale or a delicate combination of spaghetti with a light crab sauce made from Maryland blue crabs, food is where the heart is for most of us.

Whether we are Eskimo or Irish, Italian or even Minnesotan, we all seem to have certain foods we react to in a totally irrational way.

These thoughts have been swirling in my mind for a number of reasons – and believe it or not, the subsistence debate is not really one of them.  These thoughts have more to do with walking down

As much as I have tried to avoid this whole issue, I guess I have no choice but to finally weigh in with my three cents on subsistence. I get three cents instead of two because some people have just so annoyed me recently with their statements and activities on subsistence that I feel they owe me an extra penny’s worth.

Let’s start with Governor Knowles. Generally I like the guy.  But if he calls for one more commission to meet on one more topic to reach one more consensus, I’m gong to wish the sixties had never happened so

In the five years or so immediately preceding my mother’s death, she engaged in an ongoing argument with my sister and me over her kitchen. The apartment she lived in had been built around the turn of the century.  Except for painting over the glass fronted cabinets because she didn’t want anyone to see all her stuff behind them, little renovation had been done in her kitchen in the intervening 100 years.

Oh sure, she’d replaced the wood burning stove.  And she put in a metal sink stand that was ugly the day she bought it.  But she still vented

When I was the supervisor of the State Division of Family Services in Barrow back in the early 80s, it was a rule of thumb that social workers did not respond to after hour calls without a police officer escorting them.  So I was fairly unsympathetic when one of my social workers got punched in the nose while responding to a call. She had knocked on the door, a drunken parent had opened the door and the next thing the social worker knew, she was on the ground counting stars.

I believe my response to her cry for sympathy was,

It was one of those days when I knew my mother was sitting in heaven grinning from ear to ear.  Since I’d never had children, she’d never personally been able to see retribution visited on me despite her many threats of “Wait till you have children of your own”. Now, from on high, she would get her chance.

I had taken my best young friend Greta out for a day of “girl stuff”. Since I’d never really been one to indulge in those activities when I was young, I depended on Greta to walk me through the technical details.

I