Like most Alaska immigrants, my roots continue to petition for equal time.

The difference between an optimist and a pessimist? An optimist laughs to forget, but a pessimist forgets to laugh.

Kids in Alaska don't know they're growing up on the Last Frontier. It's just what they see on the license plates, and it's something tourists like to say a lot because they've never been around so many mountains and moose before.

Somebody says, 'Do a Tom Bodett, a folksy kind of thing,' and it sounds like something out of 'Hee Haw,' very insulting. They turn wry humor into disparaging sarcasm, and you get what amounts to insulting advertising.

Mine is not a story to tell struggling writers.

It's not like Alaska isn't wilderness - it mostly is. But most Alaskans don't live in the wild. They live on the edge of the wild in towns with schools and cable TV and stores and dentists and roller rinks sometimes. It's just like anyplace else, only with mountains and moose.

That's what the American odyssey is really about: Leaving home. Leaving home and coming home, and trying to understand the difference.