he felt warm and safe …
at home – drowsiness came – he
slept deliciously
Adapted from the passage by Herman Wouk in his book, The Caine Mutiny (Doubldeay, Garden City, NY, 1951), where Mr. Wouk writes:
With a sense of great luxury and well-being, Willie crawled to the narrow upper bunk and slid between the fresh, rough Navy sheets.
He lay only a few inches beneath the plates of the main deck.
He had not much more room than he would have had under the lid of a coffin.
A knotty valve of the fire main projected downward into his stomach.
The stateroom was not as large as the dressing closet in his Manhasset home.
But what did all that matter?
From the clipping shack to this bunk was a great rise in the world.
Willie closed his eyes, listened with pleasure to the hum of the ventilators, and felt in his bones the vibration of the main engines, transmitted through the springs of his bunk.
The ship was alive again.
He felt warm, and safe, and at home.
Drowsiness came over him almost at once, and he slept deliciously.
One of my favorite words, that.
Deliciously.
Delicious.
I always thought that for most the word applied to taste.
The online Merriam-Webster though defines it as affording great pleasure: delightful.
The online Oxford English Dictionary says, extremely pleasant.
When I swim in the Atlantic Ocean … I find the experience, the water, the waves, the sparkle, to be delicious.
To hold a smiling gurgling grand baby I the experience to be delicious.
When I get my morning coffee, all I can say is It is delicious.
When we stopped for ice cream cones on the way home from the beach, it was delicious.
Every bit of it.
Being in the hot car on the way home from the sandy beach and the salty water was delicious.
Stopping at and going into the grubby gas station/connivence store in our swim suits (at hour age – gee whiz) was delicious.
Eating ice cream out a cones, trying to stay ahead of how much the hot day could melt before we ate was delicious.
And the ice cream itself, butter pecan with lots of and lots of pecans, my Dad would have loved it was delicious.
And the fact that we had both learned of this hidden ice cream stop that was one our way home from the beach, with cones half the price of the places that catered to the Island tourist crowd … was delicious.
What a great word.
No Haiku For You 