She finds a seat by the fireplace, bobs her head to the music, and enjoys the over-priced drink of the day. A few more people sit by the fireplace and she wonders if they’d like her seat, but she likes her seat so she doesn’t move. In her twenties, she would have carried a book or a notebook. In her sixties, the thought of hauling out her phone to look preoccupied is upsetting.
The people next to her seem to have come from seeing a movie. They interrupt each other, highlighting the plot, the facial expressions, the music, the final scenes. She realizes she has seen the film, laughs a bit, then leans over to add her own two cent’s worth. Someone tells her to pull her chair over and join them. She can’t believe her luck.
They exchange names. Talk about ticks while out hiking, careless drivers while biking, and someone recognizes her as the woman he sees walking the cute dog all over town. “They look just alike,” he laughs. His friends look momentarily embarrassed. “No, really. The dog wears this pink harness, and is this cute white furry creature, and I remember you wearing a matching pink coat.”
“That isn’t deliberate,” she mutters. “I mean, the coat. Well, the hair, well, that just happens.” They laugh and they include her drink with their next round.
“I love your white hair,” Maura coos. “I wish my mom would quit dying hers.”
Just like that, she no longer feels as if she’s in her twenties, remembering when she’d head out of the bar with a young man looking for a late-night breakfast diner, an invite to one or the other’s apartment, a long walk through town. Then she returns to the present, back to her sixties, and a new but old Cowboy Junkies song plays, and she says, “I love ‘Don’t Let it Bring you Down.’ I can’t believe this is the Cowboy Junkies.”
“You are so old school!” Maura holds her glass for a toast: “To the old school!”
To the old school, she thinks, the day no longer feeling so grey.
Author's Comment
“A Temporary Guest” was taken from a current work in progress.
This year we celebrate the bicentennial of the birth of a great American composer. Born on July 4, 1826, Stephen Foster came to life on the same day that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. His “Oh! Susanna” became the banner song of forty-niners during the California gold rush. “Old Kentucky Home” and “Old Folks at Home” are still the state songs of Kentucky and Florida. “Camptown Races” and “Beautiful Dreamer” are sung today, more than a century and a half after they were written.
But troublesome lyrics in some of his songs risk diminishing his legacy. In Foster’s day, blackface minstrel shows were the popular entertainment, and songwriters who didn’t write for this medium would have had difficulty introducing their music to the world. The lyrics in Foster’s minstrel music, while indefensible, comprised only a small portion of his work. And decades ago, the Center for American Music revised Foster’s lyrics to omit offensive language.
It's hard to overstate the influence Foster had on American music as one of its first popular composers. Composer-lyricist Irving Berlin and composer-pianist George Gershwin both took inspiration from his songs. The tunes are timeless and the lyrics often speak to enduring and universal truths. It would be a shame if Foster, who wrote the defining music of his time, were deprived of his rightful place in history.
For this aging, vagabond author, Foster’s songs take me home to Suwannee River country in North Florida, where ancient, moss-clad oaks and palmetto scrub line the riverbanks a few miles from my grandparents’ homesteads. This book, “Beautiful Dreamer,” is my tribute to him.
Available from Amazon, Bookshop.org, or from your independent bookstore.
Diane Payne’s most recent and forthcoming publications include: Best of Microfiction 2022, Quarterly West, Cutleaf, Miramachi Flash, Microlit Almanac, Spry Literary Journal, Another Chicago Magazine, Whale Road Review, Fourth River, Pine Hills Review, Tiny Spoon, Ellipsis, Bending Genres, New York Times, Unlikely Stories, Hot Flash Fiction, The Blue Nib, anti-heroin chic, X-ray Literary Magazine, Oyster Review, Novus, Notre Dame Review, Obra/Artiface, Reservoir, Southern Fugitives, Watershed Review, Superstition Review, Windmill Review, Tishman Review, Whiskey Island, Lunch Ticket, Split Lip Review, The Offing, Elke: A little Journal, Punctuate, Outpost 19, Abandon Journal, McNeese Review, The Meadow, Burnt Pine, Story South, and Five to One. 
Marilyn Whitehorse describes her layered life: "In the topside world, I teach academic writing to people who are learning English at Kapiolani Community College in Honolulu, Hawaii. In the river that flows beneath I am a writer, photographer and collage artist."