As I get older, the attractions of foreign travel and the lures of encountering new places and fresh faces are rapidly fading. I associate holiday less and less with adventure and more and more with peace and quiet. When I was young I looked forward to visiting different countries – I estimate I have visited about fifty in my life – and keenly anticipated the possibility of exotic experiences and the enlivening acquaintance of strangers. Now I can completely understand my father who at the age of about 75 entirely ceased traveling and was content quietly with my mother to turn the pages of the sea in their wind-filled house on the north coast of Antigua. I think of my father and mother in their last years in their home in Antigua and a line from Homer comes to me: “There is nothing so good and lovely as when man and wife in their home dwell together in unity of mind and disposition.”
