A wonderful look at life in Alaska

Jim Albrecht writes about his old neighborhood in Slate Magazine:

The Old Neighborhood
My Alaska, and Sarah Palin's, deserves better from America.

For a long time I've been an Alaskan in exile, spending only a portion of each year (the sunny part) in the homeland. As a result, I am the only Alaskan that most of my friends know. So, when Sarah Palin was picked as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, the e-mail poured in. "Not all Alaskan families are as weird as the Palins, right?" wrote a friend from California.

"Let me assure you," I wrote back. "They are all freaks."

I then described, at some length, the neighborhood I grew up in. There were my parents, superorthodox Catholics, complete with backyard statuary. Across the street, an Air Force officer and family. Next-door to them, a gay couple. Not just gay, but extra-flaming, mow-the-front-lawn-in-a-nightshirt-and-nothing-else kind of gay, walk-into-a-bar-yelling, "A beer for the queer!" kind of gay (in Alaska, in the 1960s!). My parents kept an extra set of house keys for "T-Bird Tommy," as the more flamboyant partner was known, so that when he came home drunk and couldn't find his keys, he would have a nearby spare.

A bit more:

The miracle of my childhood�what still casts a sunny light on my social memories of Alaska in the '70s�is that we all got along so well. Not just coexisted, but actually had relationships with one another: We played together, shared garden produce and salmon, pushed one another's cars out of the snow, and, in that pre-cable era, found each other's idiosyncrasies entertaining rather than infuriating.

The great thing about living among freaks is that you have to do something really special to be shunned. By contrast, when I went off to an Ivy League university, my chance at social advancement was snuffed out in the dining hall in the first week of school when I unceremoniously consumed a small bowl of lettuce with my hands.

There are a lot of Jim Albrecht's out there -- it will be fun to see if he has any other stuff published. The town we live in is small (about 200 full-time residents) but I recognize a lot of the characters...