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    Flotsam: A Boomer’s Vignettes
    Flotsam: A Boomer’s Vignettes
    Flotsam: A Boomer’s Vignettes
    Ebook83 pages1 hour

    Flotsam: A Boomer’s Vignettes

    By Eugene Roome

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    About this ebook

    Flotsam contains scenes and pictures from this baby boomer's life. My experiences are no better than anyone else's: no worse. My experiences and lessons learned directly influence my novels, for as Ayn Rand says, "When you sit down to write, you do not need to calculate everything in a slow, conscious way. Your inspiration comes to the exact extent of the knowledge you have stored."

    Flotsam are those parts of the wreckage of a ship or its cargo found floating on the sea as a result of shipwreck.

    My belief is if there’s no insight, mystery, and wonder in an author’s real life, how much can be found in his or her novels? -Eugene Roome

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEugene Roome
    Release dateDec 1, 2012
    ISBN9780983569329
    Flotsam: A Boomer’s Vignettes
    Author

    Eugene Roome

    Eugene Roome grew up in the Midwest and continues to live there. Like other baby boomers, he grew up in an era without cable T.V., cell phones, or the Internet. Consequently, he learned how to entertain himself. Hopefully, his novels are able to entertain others and give them things to think about.

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      Book preview

      Flotsam - Eugene Roome

      Flotsam

      A Boomer’s Vignettes

      Eugene Roome

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright © 2012 by Eugene Roome

      All rights reserved.

      Fourth Edition

      ISBN 978-0-9835693-2-9

      This work is sponsored by the Vestibular-Motor Hallucinations Project. Flotsam contains scenes and pictures from this baby boomer's life. My experiences are no better than any other baby boomer’s experiences, no worse. But my experiences, my lessons learned, and my overall take on things directly influences my novels, for as Ayn Rand said:

      "When you sit down to write, you do not need to calculate everything in a slow, conscious way. Your inspiration comes to the exact extent of the knowledge you have stored."

      So my belief is if there’s no insight, mystery, and wonder in an author’s real life, how much can be found in his or her novels? Flotsam is the first of the series Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan, and Derelict. Flotsam are those parts of the wreckage of a ship or its cargo found floating on the sea as a result of shipwreck.

      This ebook is not licensed for your personal use only. Give it away. If you would like to share this book with another person, please do so.

      Cover and interior photos: Mr. Eugene Roome

      Table of Contents

      Wilder Than I

      Get It Right

      Piggy

      Highwaymen and Pirates

      Our Hero

      Where You Have to Go Each Day

      The Bandito

      Get Them

      Serendipitous City

      No Reservation Required

      Collegiate Requiem

      Hot For a Day

      Perchance to Dream

      An Obnoxious John McEnroe

      Learning to Type

      The Ailing Athlete

      No Social Workers

      Greg Cummings

      Be Not Afraid

      Wilder Than I

      I walk on a California beach in late-summer. I’m heading toward a headland named Point Dume. I’m alone. I seem to do most things unaccompanied. I figure I shouldn’t let my divorced, mid-fifties singleness stop me from getting out and looking around. I blame that on the ’ol pumpkin. I can’t shut him off.

      Barefoot, because that’s how I used to spend my summers, using a terraced dirt trail I climb up and away from the Pacific Ocean through environmentally sensitive areas. Point Dume’s volcanic rock cliff lords over a beach near Malibu. Each side of the trail leading to Point Dume is bordered by hip-high metal rods. Half-inch steel cable has been tightly strung rod to rod through giant eyelets in each rod end. This makes the rods and cable look two continuous, undulating lines of threaded needles.

      Now several hundred feet higher than the beach, I’d just come to the place where a spur from the trail ran out to an impressive overlook. Everywhere the cable was taut, as I said before, except here across the spur, where it sagged nearly to the ground. It was pretty clear from all the fresh footprints on the other side that many folks ahead of me stepped over the low cable to walk out and admire the ocean/beach/low coastal-mountain view. So that became my plan, too.

      As I prepared to step across the cable, all of a sudden a mid-to-late twenties couple appeared behind me. They were close enough to converse with. I explained rather self-consciously that since I wouldn’t pass this way again, I was going to step over the cable and walk out to the overlook. In a very snotty, grade-school-playground tattletale voice the much younger-than-me man said, "The whole reason they make rules is so people follow them."

      Even so, is all I replied before I stepped over the cable.

      The path out to the Point Dume promontory was less than a hundred yards in length, but it took a while for me to pick my way out there because there were miniature canyons to navigate, each made treacherous by many sharp stones, which hurt my bare feet. The late afternoon sun beat down on me with sufficient strength to have made me uncomfortably hot, but gusts of wind made cool by the ocean evened things out temperature-wise.

      While I stared out to sea and the pumpkin began to ruminate, here came that attractive young woman. She was alone. We said hi to one another. I pointed out the secluded beach to the left below us and suggested her boyfriend could escort her there.

      He’s not my boyfriend, she very quickly responded.

      Then, right on the leeward edge, one misstep or involuntary lean or wind-gust push away from plunging to her death, she quickly raised her arms over her head as if she were a sail trying to fill itself with wind. I recall being horrified that right before my eyes she would be carried over the side of Point Dume.

      I lingered a polite amount of time before retracing my route back to the main path and walked down the trail to the beach and trudged to my car and drove through L.A. to my inelegant hotel.

      She was wilder than I, the pumpkin said.

      It’s probably the different stages of our lives, I told the pumpkin. (I make it a habit to talk back to him.) "It wasn’t like she was hot for me: it was

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