Time passes for Odysseus

"As he walked up the road to  his house for the first time in decades he promised himself that he would have nothing more to do with the affairs of gods or men, would go back to his woods and the stasis of unvarying afternoons. But it seemed that the tears of reunion had scarcely dried before the house was filled with wailing and he stood before his father's high funeral pyre with a torch in his hand. Soon thereafter he held his first grandchild, and under all the weight of birth and death a dam somewhere gave way and time flooded over  him. Soon his grandson was tall and strong, as was the tree over his father's grave, and well before he was ready he could neither string his great strong bow, nor remember the names of the men who had died for him at Troy, nor speak." -- Zachary Mason, The Lost Books of the Odyssey. Blue skies! -- Dan Ford