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.

You take the lies out
and you take the malice out of him …
and he’ll disappear

Tom Ballou, the most immortal liar that ever I struck. He couldn’t ever seem to tell the truth, in any kind of weather.

Why, he would make you fairly shudder. He was the most scandalous liar! I left him, finally; I couldn’t stand it.

The proverb says, “like master, like man;” and if you stay with that kind of a man, you’ll come under suspicion by and by, just as sure as you live.

He paid first-class wages; but said I, What’s wages when your reputation’s in danger?

So I let the wages go, and froze to my reputation.

And I’ve never regretted it.

Reputation’s worth everything, ain’t it?

That’s the way I look at it.

He had more selfish organs than any seven men in the world—all packed in the stern-sheets of his skull, of course, where they belonged.

They weighed down the back of his head so that it made his nose tilt up in the air.

People thought it was vanity, but it wasn’t, it was malice.

If you only saw his foot, you’d take him to be nineteen feet high, but he wasn’t; it was because his foot was out of drawing.

He was intended to be nineteen feet high, no doubt, if his foot was made first, but he didn’t get there; he was only five feet ten.

That’s what he was, and that’s what he is.

You take the lies out of him, and he’ll shrink to the size of your hat; you take the malice out of him, and he’ll disappear.*

They saw that the ancient religions of Britain, the beliefs of the druids and like, went away when folks stopped believing in them.

Maybe if we stopped listening to lies.

Stopped reading about lies.

Stopped reporting the lies.

The liar would go away.

From Life on the Mississippi by mark Twain (Harper, New York, 1923).