Golden Globe for Best Unscripted Story

     So I learned this morning that the Golden Globe awards were last night.

         I didn't sit to watch the pageant of beautiful gowns, hear the jokes, and learn how recent movies and TV shows fared with the foreign press. I just wasn't there from my living room, as I have in past years. The way those events are covered, and with the TVs we have nowadays, even from your living room you feel almost as if you are there. But not me this year.

         Instead, I went to my sister's house to celebrate my nephew's 40th birthday. No awards, no speeches, just family. And I don't know about yours, but my family events are sort of unprogrammed round-robbins, in which you talk for 15 or 20 minutes with someone or group of someones before you're compelled to change interlocutors.

        Given a very diverse group of guests, I got to exchange thoughts about diverse things. Favorite places for brunch, for example. On this round, I ended up with the impression that I'm not a very sophisticated bruncher, because my current favorite is Cracker Barrel, which, I learned, doesn't meet the definition of a "pretty" place for brunch. But trust me, its pancakes taste like platanitos fritos (fried plantains) and it has a charming country store in front.

         Brunch aside, after last night, the opera now beckons me. Turns out the sister hosting the party, a retired college math professor, has somehow become a member of the chorus in an upcoming opera performance. If your sister is in an opera, you go see her, especially if she has a couple of complimentary tickets.

         I also learned about the trials and tribulations of being a judge, from a criminal-court judge who is related to my niece-in-law. I learned she hates it when a lawyer goes on and on just for show, but is learning to be gracious about it. She has no patience for an unprepared lawyer. Loves it when a lawyer brings to the courtroom a case on which the law is still evolving. And when a case involves child abuse, she goes into a mental zone where feelings of horror get churned through a machinery of objective composure. 

         One of my cousins, who is a lawyer, chimed in this conversation, from a lawyer's perspective. This cousin is headed cross country to celebrate my aunt's birthday, 95th, all her mental faculties, and most of her physical ones, intact.
         It is from this aunt's account that I've taken notes on the story of my grandfather's origins in Asturias, Spain, before he left for Cuba in the late 1800s. In Cuba he married my grandmother, who was 16 years younger than him. They had four daughters, including my mother. When my mother was 40, she got pregnant with me, her eighth child. We, all 10 of us, left Cuba three years later. I grew up and went to Wellesley College. In Wellesley, as it turns out, I met briefly the aforementioned judge, also a Wellesley student, as we were both Hispanas. Little did I know that decades later we'd end up in the same family parties.
         That ended up happening in a spiral of events that took place over several decades. My sister, the one now in the opera chorus, 30 years ago met a widower who had a 10-year-old son. The widower and my sister married and the boy became my sister's son, and thus my nephew, the one who just turned 40.
      My nephew grew up, and then met, fell in love and married a young woman who was friends with another sister's daughter. The young woman who married my nephew has a brother. The brother, it turns out, is married to the judge, the Wellesley grad. And that's why my fellow alum, now a judge, and I, find ourselves in some of the same family parties, decades after graduating and following completely different paths. 
       Movie and TV plots engage our interest because of how they interweave characters' lives in intricate, surprising shapes and patterns. Funny how real life does the same.
         And so the Golden Globe goes to...all of us, including you, for the uncanny twists and turns in our lives, taking us to so many surprising places and people.