Saturdays at Ten

By Grace Toll, Marion Fox, Patricia Kohn and Roz Komisar Mayer

The revelations of a holocaust survivor, a suburban housewifes infatuation with her art teacher, a mothers angst at witnessing her sons independence, a series of phone conversations that reveal the essence of friendship. Culled from their collected manuscripts over the last fifteen years, the Elkins Park Writers reveal their world in all its pain, ambiguity, beauty and humor through short stories, poetry and memoir. Wondering what it was like to grow up in post-war Brooklyn? Curious about how sisters cope with divorced parents? Ready to experience the back story of a night at the symphony? Read on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 23, 2009
• ISBN: 9781469115504

Grace Toll

The Elkins Park Writers – Marion Fox, Patricia Kohn, Roz Komisar Mayer, Grace Toll – collaborated on this collection of short stories, poetry and memoirs. Meeting in their homes in the Philadelphia area, the group explored experimental techniques and provided support to each other through constructive criticism and encouragement. The four have produced work that has been published in various newspapers and journals and won writing awards at area writing conferences.

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Copyright © 2009 by The Elkins Park Writers—Marion Fox, Patricia Kohn,

Roz Komisar Mayer, Grace Toll

ISBN:                      Softcover                      978-1-4363-8538-1

                                 Ebook                            978-1-4691-1550-4

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Contents

Introduction

The Writers Group

A Lesson from a Petunia

Meetings with Fellini

Tuesdays and Thursdays

The Deli

To Do, To Do… But by Whom?

You Have Been There

for Me All Along

Intoxicating Imagery, Dazzling Metaphorical Exploration

Aunt Sophie and Me

Dropping out at Barnes

Confession of a Nine Year Old

Altered Landscape

The Kindness of Strangers

Adventure on the

Appalachian Trail

Ultrasound

I Don’t Say Goodbye

Celebrity Hits El Greco

I Don’t Feed the Birds

The Marvels of Miraval

Dumping

Night Visitor

The Real Thing

The White Mountains

Of Horror and Gratitude

Julian

Pearl Beach at Six O’clock

To our husbands—Asher Fox, Roger Kohn, Seymour Mayer and Mark Toll—who have been most helpful. They have offered encouragement, prepared snacks and provided chauffeuring services. After a brief illness Marion’s husband, Asher, died.

His death has brought us all closer.

Introduction

The Elkins Park Writers first encountered each other in writing classes at Arcadia University’s Community Scholars Program and at Cheltenham Township Adult School. In our schoolrooms, we enjoyed excellent instructors and benefited from the diversity of a large group composed of both highly skilled and why not give it a try writers. After five seasons of reading aloud our pages of fiction and nonfiction—manually typed, then word processed, finally entered on computers—we felt the need to take ourselves in a new direction. Our plan was to meet in informal settings where we would explore wherever our individual muses led us, attempt experimental techniques and provide support through constructive criticism and encouragement.

For fifteen years, the four contributors to this volume have met in our homes each month on Saturday mornings at ten. Around our dining room tables, we read and evaluate our manuscripts. This intensive workout is always accompanied by a morning brunch.

The result is a rewarding writing experience. We have confirmed our hypothesis that there are at least three advantages of the independent group. We meet monthly, rather than weekly, giving us additional time to develop new ideas and to revise older drafts. Because we are a small gathering, we can more easily write for each other as readers rather than for an anonymous audience. And yes, the opportunity to partake of morning fruits, cheese, small cakes, coffee and tea provides warmth and comfort as we attempt to recast our own work in an objective light and critique other’s writings in turn.

Another revision? Change the ending? You think so? Time for more coffee.

Our conversation is inevitably layered with discussion of our latest submissions, acceptances and rejections, not to mention conferences attended, books read, films seen and reporting of significant life events. What started in the classroom culminated in writing partnerships, friendships and this book.

The Writers Group

Marion Fox

The sunlight is pouring in so mellow

Over the tablecloth lacy and yellow

The china dishes, the napkins to match

It’s Saturday at ten; the writers’ bash.

Strong coffee and greenish tea

Crackers embellished with the softest of brie

Oatmeal cookies and hazelnut cake,

Hasn’t there been some great mistake?

Didn’t these four women come to write

And not into gourmet goodies to bite?

Didn’t they come to add and delete

To each other’s offerings, not to eat?

The truth is the four sit together

To reach for creative selves, birds of a feather

Sometimes they’re blocked yet write their stories

Of life and love among the morning glories

The first tells a tale, voice emoting,

How loves wed on the beach, rings a’floating.

The second has a memoir evoking boat rides to Maine,

Moonlight in Rome, The Alhambra of Spain.

The third shows us a woman wanting to wed,

But first she must know him, jump into bed.

The fourth keeps a journal from which she can read

Small stories that tend to bleed.

See how the repast does its magic

Mixing with pages, comic and tragic

Imagine if the table were increased in size

These writers might win the Pulitzer prize.

A Lesson from a Petunia

Patricia Kohn

Last spring I hung a pot of white cascading petunias from a tall wrought iron hook attached to the railing of my deck. The flowers bloomed splendidly in long tendrils. At about the same time I repotted a houseplant and left the old pot, half filled with the exhausted soil, on a step under the petunia.

Weeks later I noticed that white cascading petunias were growing where the seeds of spent flowers had dropped into the pot. They had not received the benefit of fertilizer, or weeding, or thinning, yet they seemed to be thriving. So I left them alone. Now, as fall threatens to snuff out most of my annuals, a lone white cascading petunia has risen over the lip of the pot and is blooming with attitude.

This is what I like about nature. It finds its way. We may choose to nudge and prod, but the process is innately directed.

I have one child, a son, Adrien. When he left for college he assured me, without rancor, that he would not be returning home to live when he graduated. In fact, he stopped spending even summer vacations in Philadelphia after the first two years. I kept his room intact, just in case. It was only when he moved into his own apartment and took his bedroom furniture that, faced with a room achingly devoid of character, I created my office/guest room.

Those were the good old days when he lived in Washington, D.C. If an emergency arose I could be there in three hours. Not that it ever did. We visited about five times a year and kept up a good patter over the phone lines in between.

Then he decided to move to California. A place he had never visited, but was committed to anyway. What a conundrum! You try to teach children the values you prize. But of all things, why did he have to learn independence?

Bruno Bettelheim in Children of the Dream cites a similar quandary among founders of the kibbutz. They rejected the ways of their parents and forged a life based on the values of collective living. But for the kibbutz to survive, their children could not be revolutionaries. If their children sought a new order, the life they fought to create would be jeopardized. Yet, they valued the revolutionary bent and, like all parents, desired for their children to emulate them.

There was not so much at stake with my son’s decision. I was proud that he was stepping out and exploring new territory. Proud of his confidence and sense of adventure, I assured him that if things didn’t work out, he could always have his old room back. He looked at me like I was out of my mind.

That was more than six years ago. We see each other two or three times a year and I really should have bought stock in the phone company.

The first year was rough. He found himself impatient with his west coast coworkers who didn’t seem to share his sense of urgency. Their relaxed demeanor irked him. The young woman whom he had dated for five years, Andrea, gave up a job she loved to move west with him. Finding another job took more than a year, leaving her rather isolated and the two of them financially distressed.

They considered moving back east, to D.C. During a visit here they spent New Years Eve with friends in D.C. and came away certain of one thing—the pace, the politics, the obsession with work—Washington, D.C. was not for them. Surprise! They had become more Californian than they realized.

Now they are far more content. Adrien, who could never remember to take a daily vitamin, quaffs juice drinks laced with bee pollen and ginseng. He and Andrea are married. She is teaching at a private school for gifted preschoolers. While they miss the changing seasons, they aren’t ready to trade a life that includes evening strolls along the beach for daily treks to the Metro on icy sidewalks or in oppressive humidity.

I’m getting ready to pull up the serviceable Berber rug in my office/guest room and replace it with a pale flowered carpet. I’ve even appropriated the hall bath.

But at times this separation seems all wrong, like we have violated the natural order of things. I wish for casual visits, my kid just dropping by to share the everyday stuff of life, maybe staying for dinner. Recently I asked Adrien if he thought they might some day return east. Maybe, he responded breezily.

I could nudge and prod, but like my white cascading petunia, some things are innately directed. And better off left alone.

Meetings with Fellini

Marion Fox

Do certain persons appear and reappear in our lives?

A small man was knocking on the door of my car. Is anything wrong?

I had just come through an autumnal mini-tornado. Driving away from the local library, lightning had suddenly crackled through black clouds, then a torrential downpour had darkened the trees’ reds and yellows to nothingness. Alone, winds buffeting my car, my only recourse was to follow the dim lights ahead and whenever I could detect the outline of a parked car, to draw behind.

Somewhere in the darkness, on what I took to be a heavily trafficked highway, I managed to pull up. As soon as the sky brightened and the rains became mist, the small man emerged.

Don’t move your car, he warned. You’re better off waiting. There’re trees and wires blocking your way. The police tell me that it’ll be cleared pretty soon. I’ll let you know.

When my new friend returned to tell me that all obstacles ahead were removed, his words were cautious.

Open as far as I can see. Tell you the truth; everything is down in the neighborhood. You could stay here only—I hate to say it—you are out too far. But the worst mistake would be to back up to pull your rear end in…

I assured him that all I wanted to do was to go home.

Listen, lady, you have to stay cool. Before I saw you, I heard a crash. You know what it was? A tree fell on my Buick. In my driveway. Shrugging his shoulders, he added, The roof, the windshield, glass all over.

A tree on top of his Buick? And he was taking time out to advise me? I looked at him carefully. He was middle aged, a bit rotund, wearing a cap and an all-weather