It was not until I met Peter, my ex-in law step-grandfather, that I discovered what the word "hero" used to mean, in the days when it had stature and carried feeling. You may respect and admire your parents, siblings, friends, or teachers enormously, but a hero is more than someone you respect. Someone is a hero when they have done something so beyond your capacity that you would not have considered such things as possible before you met this person.

Peter is the father of the ex-wife of my step father. He is eighty or so years old and spends almost all of his time alone, sailing on his twenty or thirty foot long sailboat. He travels up and down and around the American continents, stopping to visit a village here or there along the coast. Every couple months he would send a letter, several pages long, to his home, where it was copied and sent to a list of relatives, my step father being one of them. These letters were similar to a journal; he would detail the places and people he encountered, and describe the sights or occurrences. All of his letters were clearly and concisely written in a humble and matter-of-fact manner.

My step father would read these letters to the rest of the family during dinner. Normally I am a dedicated fan of fantasy and science fiction writing, scorning realms of literature such as "non-fiction" and "historical fiction." However, I would forget my food entirely and listen, rapt, to the calm, methodical voice of my step-father whenever he read one of Peter's letters to the family. There was something subtly enthralling about his letters, something sublime about his simple, unadorned portrayal of life.

Make no mistake, what fascinated me about his letters was not the stereotypical dream of a businessmen quitting the office and going off to explore the untamed wilderness with only a machete in one hand, a six-pack of Bud Light in the other, and a fawning voluptuous nymphomaniac native girl in clothing that conceals her body slightly less well than would a small translucent silk handkerchief.

What fascinated me was the vision of pure, vigorous life that they showed me, a freedom that I had never considered possible. That is what makes Peter a hero to me; he has broken free of the rules of society and the constraints of the "common sense" we have been brought up to believe, barriers so strongly set in my mind that they seemed not to be barriers at all, but facts of existence we must live with. The inevitable shackles of age, the invisible boundaries between nations and cultures, the expectations of society, things to be tolerated only in the games of the children, and the daydreams of the foolish.