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ABOUTBlack Lamb was created to offer the discerning reader a stimulating selection of excellent original writing. Published monthly. (more) FREE SAMPLE COPYClick here to receive a free sample issue via U.S. mail. There is absolutely no obligation. SUBSCRIBESupport this independently published journal of fine essays. Annual subscriptions are $15 in the USA, $25 in Canada, $30 in the UK, or $35 elsewhere (all prices in US $). Click here to subscribe online via paypal or send a check to Black Lamb, 1759 View Drive, San Leandro CA 94577. QUESTIONSIf you have questions or comments regarding Black Lamb, please email us. |
Archive for the 'All Christmas Issue' CategoryAll I want for ChristmasDecember 1st, 2004 BY GENE RYDER All I want for Christmas is… • For my Mom to wake up in the ICU and ask everybody why they’ve been yelling “Wake up!” in her ear for seven weeks. • Every dam on the Missouri River destroyed. • A driveway fifty miles long, like Ted Turner’s in Montana. • For the seventy roosters next door to peck the eyes out of the redneck that uses them for cock-fighting. • For the weariness and fear to leave my father’s eyes.
Posted by: The Editors The woman boreDecember 1st, 2004 BY LORENTZ LOSSIUS The woman bore her last child alone Cradled in the shadow She no longer strains to hear the feathery voice But our tears are living water The dust under her feet spills over the coffin — Jacumé, September 1990 •
Posted by: The Editors The boys are getting rowdyDecember 1st, 2004 BY ALAN ALBRIGHT Graves Kaserne, Aschaffenburg, Germany The Russians, we were told, had 55 armored tank divisions, ready to roll over the Czech border into Germany and flatten us like pancakes. It was at the end of a long day and I was in the midst of a nice hot shower when I heard all the shouting: “Alert! Alert!” So it was back into uniform and off to the motor pool to rev up the ambulance and follow the others out into the middle of the woods somewhere. Then the long wait in the dark and cold until the higher-ups gave us the word that we could stop pretending. This was a game we’d play about once a month, with variations. For me, that eventually meant driving a deuce-and-a-half truck and making coffee for the officers, instead of snoozing in the back of an ambulance. We weren’t really worried, because the real thing was happening far, far away in Vietnam, where we definitely didn’t want to be.
Posted by: The Editors O Tannenbaum!December 1st, 2004 BY TOBY TOMPKINS
Posted by: The Editors A really big dealDecember 1st, 2004
Christmas was almost always a really big deal when I was a kid, back in the early Fifties. My dad was a chemical engineer, happily making metal alloys and rolling out thousands of miles of aluminum sheet to help Henry Kaiser make more millions, and we were definitely comfortable middle class in a poor rural area, slowly morphing into the suburbs of the growing city of Spokane, Washington. I was very conscious growing up that my Christmas was much more remunerative than many of my grade school classmates’ at Veradale Elementary. The year I got a three-speed Schwinn, in the fifth grade, I went to school after the Christmas break eager to tell everybody about my great new bike. The first guy I ran into, going up the steps, was Stan Goehner. I knew he got beat up at home, because he came to school with bruises, and one time with a black eye that hung on for weeks. Broken thumb, broken wrist, he always had excuses, but all the boys knew his dad was a drunk and he beat up Stan’s mom, and Stan, too. But the bike year he hadn’t been beat up, and, beaming, he said, “Look at the gloves I got!” as he produced a pair of roughout leather work gloves from the back pocket of his jeans and thrust them forward for me to see. “Nice,” I said. I knew that was it for Stan. In the fifth grade you always start at the top, right? Who starts with the knitted winter socks from aunt Elsie? Well, I told him about the books I got, from my Grampa; I didn’t feel comfortable telling him about the bike. Lordy, middle-class guilt in rural Spokane valley in 1953.
Posted by: The Editors Pure pleasureDecember 1st, 2004 BY DAVID MACLAINE I know people for whom Christmas connotes nothing but depression and frustration, their memories only of stress, family quarrels, and disappointment. If I were prone to guilt the bleakness of those memories might make me apologize for my own blissful recollection of Christmases past. As I’m not inclined to apologize for my own good fortune, I tend toward paroxysms of ecstasy just by playing back a list of the most memorable gifts.
Posted by: The Editors ‘Tis the seasonDecember 1st, 2004 BY ED GOLDBERG I have always liked Christmas, but as an outsider I’ve had a peculiar relationship to it. Being a Jew in America, or a Zoroastrian for that matter, means being marinated in the larger Christian culture, like it or not. Christians are oblivious to the phenomenon, as in the old conundrum: does a fish know it’s in water? These days, what with political correctness and the brother/sisterhood of all people, a perfunctory nod is given to ecumenicism, so we will see the odd Hanukkah menorah, Kwanzaa candelabra, or hear the mention of Ramadan. Don’t mean nothin’, Clyde. Christmas is what’s happening.
Posted by: The Editors Hating the seasonDecember 1st, 2004 BY DEAN SUESS I hate it when the family comes to visit at Christmas. Overeating, forced conversation, faked jollity, stupid stories from the past. God, it makes me want to puke. I told them, “Don’t come this year.” I just can’t handle it. Excuse the negativity, but Christmas in America has become a great disappointment, and it’s intensified within the prison setting. In prison, our expectations have been reduced to a null set, so achingly anti-celebratory as to make Dr. Seuss’s Grinch seem an archetype of cheerfulness. “The Grinch,” as you may recall, “hated Christmas,/The whole Christmas season./Please don’t ask me why,/No one quite knows the reason.”
Posted by: The Editors Keep Christmas like Cratchit or die!December 1st, 2004
We sat in the airport lounge and ordered two seven-dollar draft beers. “I’ll be glad when this whole Christmas thing is over,” Dick said. “So senseless. I’m drained by all the fuss.” “But Nat King Cole ways ‘It’s the most wonderful time of the year,’” I told him. “Don’t fight it. Enjoy the celebration.” “No, I can’t. I hate being forced to buy someone a goddamn electric fruit leather maker because it’s the only thing they don’t have.” “You poor bastard, you’re doomed to live in a rich country where you’re overwhelmed with goodies. Instead of the fruit leather machine, maybe you should buy lobsters or a bottle of Armagnac. Nobody has Armagnac.”
Posted by: The Editors Celebrating the lightDecember 1st, 2004
Advent. I have passed more than thirty Christmases in the monastery. What a marvelous time of the year it is. We prepare for the feast with four weeks of a season called Advent. Ancient and special melodies, reserved only to that season, are sung in the dark church. The vestments of the liturgy are a sober purple, and there is no decoration in the church at all: nothing at all like all the Christmas lights that go up in the cities at Thanksgiving or before. In the monastery the sign that Christmas is coming is the dark and empty church and the sparse melodies that define that time. One verse from the hymn we sing each evening at Vespers could be rendered in English (translating also its spirit) like this:
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