Mary Had A Baby (II)

Mary Had A Baby (I)

I am not a fan of Christmas carols. In fact, you might say that Christmas carols bring out the Grinch in me (as if I need any help). There is, however, at least one Christmas carol to which I am partial.


I first heard Mary Had A Baby on Bruce Cockburn's Christmas album fifteen years ago. It is a good old-fashioned call-and-response spiritual and it always seems to put me into a good frame of mind, if not into a Christmas-like frame of mind.

It is also one of the few songs whose words I could remember in their entirety when I was in Tanzania last year. The girls at the orphanage I was volunteering at constantly sang, and they asked (or rather, demanded) that volunteers share songs with them.

Happily, the girls loved Mary Had A Baby as much as I did and we often sang the song together. They even created a little "choo choo train" dance for the part of the chorus that goes, "The people keep coming but the train has gone." Dancing is not something I normally associate with Christmas carols, but in this case it matched the joy of the music.

Remembrance of Battles Past

I went to a local shopping mall today and came face-to-face with a reminder of my childhood in northern Saskatchewan. The parking lot was covered with a series of snow ridges created by the snow plows that cleaned Yonge Street. Although the ridges seemed as tall as the ones I remembered, they were lacking one feature: armies of youngsters reliving battles we hadn't even heard about yet.

The Dala-Dala of Toronto

Well, the big storm came and the big storm went, and life goes on in Toronto.

The roads were a mess, as usual for these kinds of things, but the commute home was surprisingly easy. It took about two hours to get from work to apartment (including 30 minutes spent waiting for the bus to turn from the depot onto Yonge Street), but I didn't see any accidents. Perhaps people stayed home -- I know the bus that normally is packed from front to back during blizzards had less than 10 people on it for the entire journey.

The subways, however, were another thing all together. It was so jam-packed with people that it reminded me of the dala-dalas that I took last year when I visited Tanzania. Unlike those overly-crowded vans, however, the riders of the subway were anything but gracious fellow travellers. Torontonians, it seems, get grumpy when they have to share public transit.

The (Froz-)End Times?

Ontario is supposed to be on the receiving end of a huge winter storm tomorrow. The local media are happier than kids in a candy shop, and they seem to be trumpeting themselves as the best provider of storm information.

The funniest thing about the anticipated storm is the fact that some media outlets have been calling it "stormageddon", but I am not sure they are entirely correct about the theological significance of this storm front. However, if you do not see any more posts from the Griot, I guess it means that the Rapture has come and that I had a lot more faith than I thought.

Bye-Bye Bettie

An accidental pioneer of the sexual revolution died in Los Angeles on Thursday. Bettie Page, the model and "Notorious" subject of a recent film biography, died at 85 after being hospitalized for a heart attack.

When we think of the Fifties in America, we often think of Father Knows Best, Joseph McCarthy, and a tendency towards conformity. Bettie Page was certainly marching to a different drummer as she progress from modeling bikinis and see-through lingerie to posing for sadomasochistic photos complete with high heels and a whip.

Bettie Page seemed to keep her fame (or infamy) in perspective. She once said that she became a model because it seemed like an easier way to make a living than pounding away at a typewriter. She felt that God approved of nudity, since Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden of Eden. She thought the S&M photos were silly. She didn't understand why Senator Estes Kefauver was outraged enough to target her in his congressional inquiry into pornography. When she quit modeling, it was because she was 34 and her days as the girl with the perfect figure were over.

By all accounts, Bettie Page's personal life was tumultuous. In 1959, she became a born-again Christian and attended Bible school. She wanted to become a missionary but was turned down -- not because she was a notorious pin-up model, but because she was divorced. She wound up working for the Billy Graham ministry. A move to California led to several stays in mental institutions and relative obscurity until the 1990s, when Bettie Page became discovered by a new generation.

In some ways, the passing of Bettie Page is a signpost pointing towards the end of an era. In a world of easily accessible pornography and the sexualization of damn near everything, it is hard to believe that a pinup model wearing high heels and holding a whip was once enough to inspire a congressional inquiry.

The Return of the Griot

Somebody once asked me why I named this blog "SilentGriot". After all, the whole point of having a blog is to let people know what you are thinking about. I suppose that I somehow understood when I started this blog that there would be times when the stories dried up.

It seems to me that I've spent a good part of my working life telling stories. I've been a telephone bill collector, a manager, a corporate executive, an instructional designer, and a trainer/facilitator. In my personal life, I take photographs and try my hand at the occasional poem, short story, and script. Perhaps it is no wonder that I ran out of things to blog about.

Anyhow, the current period of silence has come to an end. I can't promise you a post every day, but (for now) the Griot is no longer silent.