Elise Sereni Patkotak

When I was growing up there were certain rites of passage that were fairly sacred to young womanhood.  One of them was buying your first pair of high heeled shoes.  Or, at least a somewhat reasonable facsimile. The first pair was inevitably a compromise between what your mother considered a suitable height and what you considered a suitable height.  The difference amounted to only an inch or so in physical reality but in psychic reality it was about a million miles.

I got my wish in 8th grade when my mother allowed me to purchase a pair of shoes with

I’m a volunteer at Bird TLC.  It’s a place where injured birds come to be healed. We see everything from the smallest chickadee to the largest eagle. Some are lucky and can return to the wild. Some are not so lucky and become education birds because they’ll never be able to successfully fend for themselves.  And some are downright unlucky and have to be euthanized because there is just nothing that can be done to save them.

I was at the center the morning the injured ravens were brought in.  You remember. Some idiot who mistook his manhood for his

On my way east for the holidays this year, I took a little detour to join my sister on a road trip that went from LaLa Land to the Land of Fruits and Nuts and back.  I am, of course, referring to a trip from Las Vegas to Southern California and back

.

Did you know that there was a four-story store dedicated to M&M’s on the strip in Las Vegas?  Better yet, you can actually get maroon and teal M&M’s there.  You can’t miss it. It’s right next to the Coca-Cola store.  Who knew soda and candy could be

For reasons based mainly in guilt, I am actually going to travel east this holiday season.  After an absence of five years, my brother will be part of my mother’s holiday again and my sister and I decided that it would be nice if we were all together for Christmas Eve – something we haven’t achieved for more than 15 years.  Besides, it was easier to just accept the horror of holiday travel than to accept the quiet sighs from my mother that would end every conversation we’d have between now and Christmas if I wasn’t heading east.

This holiday

I don’t want to sound like I’m whining here, but what is it with all this rain in December?  Does Anchorage not have any idea at all about how to do winter?

I look out at the street in front of my house and instead of those lovely brown snow berms, I see four inches of ice so smooth you could hold Olympic tryouts on it.  The mud that I associate with spring break up is a Christmas phenomenon here.

At the risk of sounding like a displaced bush rat, let me just say that in the bush we know

Of all the things I expected my mother to become in her old age, a female Dirty Harry did not even make the Top 10. And yet, this 83 year old Italian lady has taken to chasing intruders out of her house with telephones and colanders and then going back to bed without giving it another thought.

The first time this happened, the family was more than a little amazed but felt that since it happened in broad daylight, she was probably feeling braver than she would have otherwise. Someone had climbed into her kitchen window as she watched her

It occurred to me recently that if America’s position on tobacco were to be represented graphically, it would look like a pretzel on acid.

I say this because I find myself smiling cynically every time another public figure expresses outrage over something a tobacco company has done.  In particular, I find myself grinning at the latest brouhaha that developed when one of our fine tobacco companies recently tried to convince an Eastern European country that they were actually some positive benefits to their product. Like, for instance, early death that keeps down all those pesky health care costs incurred when

Pure pork fat covered in chocolate – does it get much better than that? A Ukrainian chocolate factory apparently doesn’t think so.  This is their newest offering.  In what can only be called a truth in advertising campaign, the name of their product is “Fat in Chocolate”.

It’s true that life’s greatest pleasures are its simplest, isn’t it?  Just plain old Fat in Chocolate.  No fancy name to cover up its deadly sin.  No jazzy advertising campaign to make us believe that eating pork fat covered chocolate will make us prettier or sexier or more virile.  In fact, it will