The Long Way

by Jeff Kozzi

An aunt from Arizona visited this summer, escorted by my parents as part of the tour to relatives unseen for decades. Calling the visit brief is no exaggeration. If not for a ten minute talk outside my house, her circuit would have been akin to a bus tour of Hollywood Mansions, where the guide gossips about who lives here and there, what famous and infamous acts and actions the resident perpetrated, what old family videos and films the resident had appeared in.

I had been one of the infamous individuals over the years, at times indignant and indigent, the son who grew from a complacent child to a tenacious teen, openly obstinate in my objectives, overnight in the eyes of my parents. My aunt had not seen me since I was that complacent ten year old with the blind faith of innocence and ignorance, a boy living in both fear and hope as the projected burden of one parent and the deepest pool of potential of the other. My aunt’s knowledge of my dumb and daring deeds derived from details in late night long distance calls and hand-scrawled captions inside Christmas cards.

This lack of close contact is why, despite my certainty of her good intent, her words of approval festered old wounds. Standing on the sidewalk under the shadow of my house, she gripped my forearm with the presumed intimacy only distant family can muster and said, "You’ve come a long way."

I forced a smile. As a teen, I would have answered her with my truths. Twice the life gone by, I am no less quick to pick fights; I’ve just learned to choose my battles more carefully, more constructively. I saw no need to break an old woman of her delusion that I had came around.

Yes, I made some drastic decisions back in my wayward youth. Some of those choices were indeed wrong. Many weren’t. Some seemed wrong to others, but proved themselves with time and effort.

The third of three sons, I was the first who didn’t follow in my father’s footsteps, and for that, the support, emotional as well as any other kind, was begrudgingly withheld. Cycles of acrimony and vainglorious pride had for a time not only made the roads harder, but obliterated them from the map. I had appealed to this aunt by letter once in trying to mend the fences, and was told "I don’t want to be involved."

My brothers work in places my father spent his working years and career, to his great pride. Those sons had become an extension of him while I spent my time as a non-published writer, "the son the bum." Time marched on. Distanced from my family, my opportunities to be harbinger of dread disappointments to be shared with the distant relatives diminished. My brothers, remaining closer to home, found familial favor a fickle thing. Their kids provided the new generation of mistake makers and personal problems.

Finally, the plan started working. Rental income pays my mortgage, allowing more time at the word processor rather than working disparate and disparaging duties. The latest of those jobs required extensive travel, most often to Europe. My list of publications is steadily growing. As a local author with published horror and fantasy pieces, I was invited to lecture a community college Fantasy Lit Class. My contribution to the content of my parents’ late night calls and the cat-scratched caption in the Christmas cards now involves what countries I visited in the past year and how I rebuilt an eroded edifice into a remarkable residence on a main street of the Renaissance City.

As part of his retirement routine, my father comes almost weekly, ostensibly to help with the many projects, and help is the case, usually. When my travel schedule and other commitments had curtailed the maintenance call for a couple months, I gave him a quick tour of accomplishments and additions. His response, gratifying most not for its sincerity but for the admission of his doubts, was "Now I can finally see what you saw in this place."

I correlate my father’s reaction to changes over a couple months to what my aunt must have seen in two decades filled with my parents’ reports of sins and crimes real and imagined. She heard the stories, then finally met in the flesh a world traveling homeowner, hearty and hale.

She didn’t see the long nights alone in front of WordPerfect’s white window; the hours of digging that developed the domain and the traditional Yankee wall of uncemented stone; the work in Northern England’s cold wet retired airfields. People see what they want to see. If she chooses to see only traditional success rather than the untraditional underpasses from which it was actually achieved, I have more productive uses of my time than engage in an argument without resolution or end or purpose. There’s another trip to plan, spots in that wall that need more stones, Impatiens to plant again next spring, continued concepts to be explored in WordPerfect’s glare.

I haven’t come a long way, not by the standards my aunt invoked. It has taken me a lot longer than I thought it would. I’m not fully there yet, but my faith in myself and my absolute, unwavering obstinacy has brought limited success with the promise of even greater achievement ahead.

That long way brought me where I am now. Literally and figuratively, I have cut through the vine-enmeshed, poison ivy infested forest and paved an indirect way that curves around someone else’s property before it leads to mine. I built that roadway without familial help, a long way around, with a steep slope with a 90-degree upwards curve before it levels off then more gently slopes back down toward the house. Steep stone stairs connect driveway to house. Going out to face the world requires effort every day.

I have taken the long way to a place my aunt could not recognize because she had not seen the intervening twenty-five years of living a diverse and didactic life. My brothers have stagnated, their remaining hair bright silver to my full head of light brown. That "long way" has led me to satisfaction and happiness in my life.

I do not feel that I have come a long way, with any of the implications that I came around.

I think, "Now they can finally see what I always saw in myself."

-30-

This essay originally appeared in The Dana Literary Society Online Journal (now defunct.)