The Corleones Couldn't Leave Either, And They Had Better Lawyers Than You

Some stories are just the truth wearing a nicer coat.

I never had much patience for the fuss around The Godfather. Puzo's book had its place, the way most things have a place if you're willing to make room. But the film always struck me as someone draping a tarpaulin over a collapsed roof and calling it architecture. It looks like something, sure. Whether it is something depends on how close you're willing to stand.

The Corleones are a family that spent three generations pretending the foundation wasn't cracked. Vito with his olive oil and his courtesies, Michael with his college education and his clean hands. That boy ran from the family business like a man who believes he can outpace his own shadow. He couldn't. Nobody can. The shadow is attached.

I think about the year the county fair ran nine days longer than it was scheduled and nobody could leave. Not a figure of speech. Nobody left. Folks had to eat what was available, sleep where they could, live inside something that had stopped being a fair and started being a condition. You adapt or you don't, but either way, the fair doesn't care about your plans. The Corleones were in a fair that never closed, and every time one of them thought he'd found the exit, there was another tent.

Sonny found that out. Paulie found that out, though in his case the lesson was considerably shorter. Michael found it out last, which is the worst way to find anything out, because by then you've already spent everything you had on the idea that you were different.

Old Mrs. Miller from the other side of town used to say you want your love to be like that oak. I always thought she meant something about planting. She did not. She meant you don't get to want a different tree than the one already growing in your yard. It's there. Its roots are where they are. You can cut it down, but the roots stay, and in a few years something comes up from them that you didn't plant and didn't plan for and cannot easily explain to company.

The Corleones cut down every tree they had and kept being surprised by what grew back.

That's the thing the film gets right, even if it gets it right by accident. It's not about crime. Crime is just the weather in that story. It's about a family that never learned to say a true thing to each other at a regular hour on an unremarkable day. The love was there. I'm not disputing the love. But love kept in a locked room doesn't circulate. It goes stale. And then somebody opens the door and wonders why the air is bad.

I've got a fruitcake in the kitchen that's been circulating through Harrow Corners since 1954. Comes back to me every Christmas without fail. Nobody eats it. Nobody throws it out. It persists because it was made with care and a certain stubbornness, and the world, whatever else you want to say about it, respects stubbornness. The Corleone family was made with care and stubbornness too. The difference is the fruitcake never hurt anybody.

The year the lake gave the Hendersons' boy back changed things around here in ways that are hard to put plainly. But folks adapted. You learn what a place requires of you, and you meet that requirement or you move, and if you move, the place sends something after you anyway, so you might as well stay and deal with it directly.

Michael Corleone moved. Figuratively, literally, every which way a man can move. He ended up in a chair by a lake looking like a man who finally understood the question but had run clean out of time to answer it.

The film is worth watching. I'm not saying it isn't. I'm saying watch it the way you'd watch weather coming in over the ridge: not for entertainment, but for information. Figure out what it's telling you about your own house. Then go tend to whatever you've been putting off.

The story doesn't bite. Your actual life does.

Tend what's yours before it tends itself. -- Aunt Dot
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