UP THE CREEK:

Grandma Grete in her kitchen

I can bring home the Bacon!

Enjoli.

Fry it up in a Pan!

Enjoli.

And Never, Never, Never let you forget You're a Man!

'Cause I'm a Woman!

(1979 - Charles of The Ritz Creates Enjoli. The New 8 Hour Perfume for The 24 Hour Woman.)

I can’t say exactly where the conversation began. But, it seems I’ve been having it one way or another for most of my life: with other women, with men, with men and women, and constantly with myself.

In our so-called modern world, how do we come to terms with the biological fact that women have the ability to run governments, go to war, work in the field, carry and bear children, and fry up the damned bacon, often earning less than our male counterparts?  And let’s not forget that the bearing children part of the equation has an expiration date.

Recently, at brunch with my mother, I mentioned that in addition to her and my father, my German immigrant, factory-working grandfather had been highly influential in my pursuit of a journalism degree and a literary career path.

While playing Chinese Checkers or Crazy Eights (both of which he let me win) Grandpa Erich would say, “You vill go to college and you vill haf a career.”

I never doubted him. And what about a husband and children? I wanted both.

My mother, ah my mother who came of age in the late '50s, who refuses to watch the television show Mad Men, because “I remember those days well enough, thank you,” her mother, my grandmother, Grete–former cleaning lady and baker of the most extraordinary Streusel Coffee Cake on the planet–had no use for college for her firstborn, first American daughter. No, my mother would marry an ambitious young man and have babies.

Which, she did. Four of them; me being the oldest, and if not the most brilliant, she might say, ‘the most driven.’  To this day, my beautiful, stylish, articulate, well-read mother will bring up the fact that in her community, she is one of two women who did not, in fact, go to college.  But what about her driven eldest daughter?

While, I never doubted I would earn a living as a writer, I never imagined that once I was married and had my own daughter, how split I would feel over my domestic responsibilities (Yes, I can get stains out of any fabric.). Leben or arbeiten - Work or love?

Or, perhaps the choice to become an artist? 

Artists, who often refer to their art as their baby, might say the choice to devote themselves to their craft is as demanding and rewarding as mothering a child. In Philadelphia, a new initiative is lighting a path from warehouse to church, spotlighting artists, characters, and intellectuals in the nomadic art salon called the Fourth Wall.

And so, this month, with the confirmation of U. S. Supreme Court Justice Elaine Kagan and the recent confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor–women of my generation who are both single and childless–Wild River Review explores the roles of women and men in a world where “choice”  comes with consequences.

In her Essay, Me and Edvard Munch, Phyllis Ward brings us back to the year Enjoli Perfume was introduced, and explains how a painting by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch helped her reconcile her choice to fully pursue a career as a producer for a major television network.

Hmmm... I knew women who were terrific mothers, I knew women who had great marriages and I knew women who had major careers. But all three? No, I didn't. I could think of a handful that were successful at two out of three...

Fire Season has begun in the western United States. In the 1950s, Jack Kerouac famously and romantically chronicled his 63-day stint in a fire tower on Desolation Peak, Washington state. But what about Fire Watchers who spend six months of the year on remote mountaintops watching for fires that can devestate old growth forests? Janice Gable Bashman profiles Kathryn Ball, the only female Fire Watcher in Sequoia National Forest.

“Initially I became a fire watcher just so I could survive," she says. "Now, I’m doing it because I love it...It's made me realize what a huge role lookouts play in the lives of people associated with the forest. What strikes me is when girls come up to the lookout. They can’t believe I live without a TV, blowdryer, makeup, etc. Then they start thinking it’s pretty neat and ask how they can do it. How can I get this kind of job?”

Ball is the first to admit that working as a lookout is challenging, and especially difficult to spend five to six months away from friends and family. The lifestyle can take its toll, and Ball is no exception.

In his third dispatch from Afghanistan, DISPATCHES - Camp Delhi, Helmand Province: Headquarters 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines, combat artist Michael Fay illustrates and describes the rigors of being a marine in one of Afghanistan’s most dangerous provinces.  And raises an important issue, Where are the women?

 There’s a minor statistic that doesn’t get a whole lot of play in the coverage of Afghanistan. In fact, based on my own observations, I would classify this bit of information as little more than a rumor. But the Marine Corps, being what it is, has decided to take this data and run with it. This is the unsubstantiated claim I’m referring to; half the population of Afghanistan is women…

Sergeant Melissa Hernandez is an MP (military police) by trade...She’s as geared up as any Marine I’ve ever seen, along with a team of two other female Marines and a female Navy corpsman. They’re on their way outside the wire to meet with local women. In my humble opinion these women are doing more than the entire National Organization of Women put together...

Landscape artist Peter Soderman is back with all his machismo in tact. He travels to the Dominican Republic bound for Haiti hoping to assist Dr. Paul Farmer and the victims of Haiti's earthquake. 

Last February I landed in a resort hotel in the Dominican Republic...I was unappointed, unheralded, uninvited and unsummoned,  but I mounted my steed, anyway, to lend the Haitians a New Jersey Blue Collar helping hand.

Nothing happened.

Instead, I remained chained to the judgment throne of a plastic chair beside the hotel's swimming pool. For one week, I watched people sheathed in suntan petroleum float across the pool. While corpulent vacationers soaked in a hot tub of uncaring humanity, I thought about the man I’d met two years earlier, a man the Haitians and the International Medical establishment called Dokte Paul or just Doctor Paul Farmer, the man who would cure the world…

And In Orbit columnist Dorion Sagan, son of two of the world’s most influential scientists, biologist, Lynn Margulis and astronomer Carl Sagan, explores the mysteries within and of our planet: Of Whales and Aliens - The Search for Intelligent Life on Earth.

If such whales with whom we share this oceanic planet remain deeply mysterious, intelligent aliens in our midst, the same may also be true of a far larger being, even closer to us. I speak of the planetary biosphere of which we humans seem to be minute parts, not unlike some of the cells of our own bodies which, if they are sentient, which some may well be, likely have zero conception of the coffee-sipping, car-driving wholes of which they are part...

Desk Jockey packs up his bike and travels to a country I know well, Greece. I’ve spent many hours roaming the city of Athens, particularly the environs of the Acropolis. My only experience of violence, if one could call it that (and some feminists do), were tacky catcalls from bored men at the local cafés.

The riots that engulfed Athens this spring, alarmed Desk Jockey, but didn’t deter him from making his way to Crete. 

Old men in dark suit jackets over baggy trousers hobbled with canes in the middle of these roads, oblivious to automobile traffic (because there basically wasn’t any). If they weren’t on foot, they were surrounded by a group of men just like themselves at small cafes playing backgammon in the midday sun, puffing away at cigarettes and drinking small cups of coffee…

Again, one might ask the question.  Where are the women?

Many years ago, on a spring morning in Crete, a line of verse came to me as I stood outside a cave where the locals lit votives to the Virgin Mary: The women swim through time…

I had recently been on vacation with my family on the island of Mykonos. We had then gone to Athens for a few days. One night in our hotel near the Acropolis, I settled in for a bath when I heard a knock on the door. In came my then eight-year-old daughter, who sat on the edge of the tub bringing with her all the mystery of our strange and confounding planet, a girl on the cusp of puberty for whom all was possible.

My daughter sits on the edge

of a deep narrow tub

and washes my back.

I close my eyes and smile

as she says,

Now, we'll wash your hair...

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