Ruminations on Puritan Traditions and (the Corleone) Family

When I am traveling for work, I have a routine I follow when I get to my hotel room after a day spent at a client site.

First, I text Basil to let him know I made it to the hotel. If it is the first day of my stay at the hotel, I send him my room number and the name of the hotel. If I am in a bigger city, like Chicago, I’ll send the address too. But a lot of the places I go there is only one Hilton property in town, so including an address is superfluous.

Second, I set up the ironing board and the iron. The ironing board always has a powder blue cloth cover and white metal legs. Since hotel room irons are, at best, dim platonic shadows of the amazing Rowenta iron Basil got me some years ago, bracing myself for disappointment is always part of this process too.

Third, while the iron warms up, I turn on the television. Although I am almost always staying at a Hilton property, the television options can still vary a surprising amount. The size of the screen doesn’t matter as much to me as the programming information. My least favorite option is cable with no on-screen guide and no HMDI capabilities: I have to flip through the channels manually like it’s 1999 to figure out what is on. My favorite option is DirectTV, which has an on-screen guide listing hundreds of channels, including at least one where Law and Order is on at all times. (No matter how much work I have to do or how homesick I am, the sound of Sam Waterston’s voice improves my mood by at least 10%.)

By the time my channel selection is done, the sub-par iron is typically hot enough to get at least some of the wrinkles out of the shirt and pants I plan to wear the next day.

I was undergoing this routine a few weeks ago in Geneseo, New York. The Hampton Inn in Geneseo has a middle tier television option: not DirectTV, but an onscreen guide and a sleep timer option on the remote. As I began to click through the listing of what was playing, I was shocked to see The Godfather Trilogy had just begun playing on BBC America.

Part of my surprise came from my past experience with what is typically playing on BBC America: it is usually reruns of The X-Files or Star Trek Voyager. And not just one or two episodes, but hours of back to back series binges. I would have thought the point of BBC America is to bring BBC programming to the US, but it appears to mostly exist to rerun American content to Americans. A look at their website claims BBC America features all of these shows, but I have yet to experience this supposed variety.

The other part of my surprise was that, out of everything they could have been playing, they were playing The Godfather movies. I picked up my phone and texted Basil:

They are playing the Godfather Trilogy on BBC America. I am convinced it is a sign from Aunt Terry.

While I frequently think of Aunt Terry, thoughts of her had been even more present with me in the 24 hours leading up to my first ironing session in Geneseo because I had flown into Buffalo International Airport the night before.

This was my first time flying into Buffalo for work. I had flown into the same airport dozens of times earlier in my life for family vacations, to see relatives from both my mother’s and my father’s sides of the family. My flight from Denver arrived in Buffalo late, after 10 pm. The airport was empty: all of the other gates and shops were closed, save for the Anchor Bar and Restaurant, which was filled with a dozen or so weary late night travelers. Trips to the Anchor Bar for wings were staples of every visit I made to Buffalo growing up, and I could smell the vinegary tang of their signature wing sauce as I walked past.

As I walked towards the baggage claim, I remembered all the times my grandparents had come to pick me up at the Buffalo Airport’s one and only terminal. As many of my visits occurred prior to the changes in travel rules brought about by the September 11th terror attacks, I could still remember what particular gate one of my grandfathers stood at when I deplaned from a Phoenix flight. I saw each one of them standing, smiling, with their arms open for a hug: Grandpa Marvin with his peppery hair and glasses; Grandpa Dan wearing one of his brightly colored golf shirts, the overhead lights gleaming on his bald head. I forced myself to keep walking, right through each memory: I needed to get my suitcase and find a rental car.

As I stood at the baggage carousel, the thought I had been trying to fend off since I landed settled around me, like dust returning to the ground after a cattle stampede: I was in Buffalo, the place I had always thought of a second home because of family who lived here. But now there was no longer anyone to see. All the Drews had passed away, all the Siegels had moved away. And yet Buffalo was still so important to me. What was I to do with all of the love of I have for Buffalo now, this love that I have had for as many decades as I have been alive?

When I got into my rental car, I started the ignition and then promptly burst into tears.

“What do we do now, Buffalo?” I felt foolish for asking the city aloud. “What do we do now?”

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I spent my undergraduate years learning all I could about Early American literature: my focus was anything written before 1900. More than one semester I focused on the literary tradition of the Puritans and their descendants. I think part of what was fascinating to me about the Puritans was that I grew up with very little working knowledge of Christianity or Christian traditions. Picking up their writings was a crash course in a lot of biblical history and philosophy I had not encountered before.

One facet of the Puritan spiritual tradition was predestination: the idea that only God could determine if someone was going to get into heaven or not. And not only was God the only one to determine someone’s eternal fate, but this fate was decided not as a result of the good or bad deeds someone performed throughout their time on Earth, but rather was predetermined by some secret criteria only known to God.

Not surprisingly, people raised in the Puritan tradition by families and communities who believed in predestination did not abandon their curiosity about whether they were destined to be “saved” or not, simply because they could not control this cosmic choice. Instead, many spent their entire lives looking for signs from God to indicate their fate. And by looking for signs, I don’t mean just for cataclysmic, infrequent occurrences: a shipwreck, a still birth of their first child, or some other landmark event. Reading private journals from this time period reveals people looking for hints about their eternal predisposition in the every day. One man was wrote about a series of Greek pillars that showed up again and again in his dreams, wondering over and over whether they signaled eternal doom (think he was also partially dealing with some homoerotic tensions, but that’s a different discussions for a different day). One woman saw a hawk snatch a snake from the ground and tear it apart in the sky, which she ruminated on as meaning God had saved her from the influence of Satan on her hike. If God cared to send her this signal, could it mean she was chosen to ascend to heaven when she died?

Aunt Terry loved The Godfather Trilogy. I myself was raised on the movies from an age that was younger than most would find appropriate for their children: I had already seen the first two movies before I went with my parents to see the third installment when it premiered on Christmas Day in 1990. I was nine years old. (I assume this part of my upbringing, combined with my parents’ love of Italian food, are major contributing factors to my love of Italian men.) What was the likelihood BBC America would take a break from their regular X-Files on the USS Voyager to bring me not one, but THREE movies Aunt Terry and I loved so much?

As I stood in my hotel room in Geneseo, ironing a pink dress shirt while I watched Michael Corleone reckon with his own future, I thought of the Puritans scouring their daily existence for signs from God. While my ideas of faith and spirituality are different, I too live in a world I find to be, more often than not, chaotic, bewildering, and uncertain. It is natural to want to look up and see a sign post, a gesture, some indication from the great beyond that we are where we are supposed to be. Or at least headed in the right direction. And, in my case, that people I love who are no longer here with me are still checking in every now and then.