I am boggled by my daughter’s prowess at the word game Boggle. In 2017, I wrote about the game itself. Then, in 2021, I noted how much better my daughter plays.
Now, she beats me. Every time. I will have a small lead at some point, but she always comes back. She usually beats her mother, too. But my worst results happen when I play both of them. Each of them finds different words that I write down.
Of course, she used words I didn’t see, but also ones I didn’t really know, such as grava and weap.
My wife and I were also boggled by the tattoo she got this month in honor of the late feline Midnight. The design she developed was based on his photo, plus the moon and stars. No, we did not know that was going to happen.
God’s gonna trouble the water.
I was also mildly surprised to hear her singing Wade In The Water around the house. Usually, she’s into a song from 1990s soul artists. Indeed, I did not know she knew the song. I asked her how she learned it, but we got more into the song’s derivation.
Some of her friends suggested it was NOT tied to Harriet Tubman sending a message to enslaved people escaping their bondage. The National Parks Service agrees: “Tubman sang two songs while operating her rescue missions: “Go Down Moses,” and “Bound for the Promised Land.” However, I can find several references stating otherwise. The song is generally considered a recognition that one should venture into even unknown waters because God will be there.
The song was famously included in the 1901 “New Jubilee Songs as Sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers. The book was published by Frederick J. Work and his brother John Wesley Work Jr., a teacher at the HBCU Fisk University in Nashville who spent years collecting and promulgating songs of this nature.” Here’s a later iteration of the group performing the song.
BlackHistory360 and a United Methodist minister describe the tale’s biblical roots. While it does reference the famous Moses Crossing the Red Sea story in Exodus, the heart is a New Testament tale.
The Gospel
“The refrain… is based upon the narrative of John 5:2-9. It is the story of the pool by the Sheep Gate—Bethzatha in Hebrew. A portion of this passage follows: “Now there is at Jerusalem by the sheep market a pool, which is called in the Hebrew tongue Bethesda… In these lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered, waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel went down at a certain season into the pool, and troubled the water: whosoever then first after the troubling of the water stepped in was made whole of whatsoever disease he had .”
It has been embraced by generations of Civil Rights activists. When I was growing up, I thought of it initially as a response to the insane reaction some white communities had to black kids swimming in the local municipal pool or even a particular section of a lake, which I wrote about here; bizarrely, in 2009, there was a then-contemporary example.
Wade In The Water:
The Soul Stirrers
The Staple Singers
So, my daughter’s venture into older music, which I did not expect, was fruitful.
When I was in college, looking for a pseudonym, just in case, I mixed up the letters in Roger Owen Green. It came out as George R.N. Roween. George was obvious. When I was in high school, two of the guys I hung out with were named George. A young woman in our group started calling ME George, much to my irritation.
On our recent vacation in the Berkshires, we brought along the word game Boggle. I described it four years ago 