The 8th Day of Christmas

This is a zoetic message from Michael Scarmack on the first day of the year 2024.

The message is entitled The Eighth Day of Christmas, subtitled, Ordeals and Distress of the Babies of Stacey and Michael.

Outside, now, someone is doing target practice, big C4 type explosions, and interspersed with multiple rapid firing of some kind of automatic weapon sup-positioning they are trying to pretend they're aiming at Bambi, the deer. Well, as we all know, they're probably getting ready for some violent revolution in the coming year.

Yes, it is the eighth day of Christmas, but one would really be hard pressed to understand that.

The neighbors already have their Christmas tree out on the porch, devoid of the ornaments and the lights that once held them either yesterday, or a few days before, and it now is ready for its own demise with decomposition of its needles, branches and trunk.

But the story we'd like to share today has to do with our babies, Stacey and myself.

Andria Claire

Our first child was born in the early years of the 1980s, the late spring of that year and unto the first days of summer.

She was delayed in exiting the womb. We had gone to the hospital. However, the medical staff said, just go home. And so we did for another 24 hours.

Andria Claire came to us that next day with a what one would say, laboring intensely, by her mother, Stacey. She came to us as we were living in a rural part of Athens County, Ohio.

I had a white Dodge van trying to be the semblance of a carpenter without many tools, and had built a structure atop a brand new concrete block foundation, symmetrically situated on a hundred-year plus old oak tree about 200 yards to the east, or shall I say 50 yards to the east of the gambrel roof shaped building.

One loft for sleeping, a lower open space with an open kitchen and a pot-belly coal stove fireplace that actually burned coal. The house was unfinished and although it was insulated the sheathing to go over the insulation was yet to be installed.

We had Andria that year and lived there for some time while gardening in the summer and heating with coal in the winter. Working odd jobs for myself, and Stacey, was working in her social service endeavors at a base minimum wage which was very very little in those early’ 80’s.

There came a time where Stacey and I had returned home with the baby in hand and were confronted with the landowner’s daughter carry a big butcher knife and threatening us with it, exclaiming that house I had built on her father's property was her house, and, we better get the heck out of Dodge. We did that very night. It was an exodus.

It was coming at us violently. We had no other option but to leave the premise and so we did with our one year old child. We went and lived for a while with some friends on the other side of the county.

Later we moved on to a small shack on a beautiful, beautiful ridge closer to the city of Athens, but out a bit, surrounded by pasture land and the nearest neighbor a quarter of a mile up the road.

Cara Marie

It was in this place our second child, Cara Marie, was to be born. I had a job working in a restaurant in the city and Stacey had concluded she could no longer do her social services work. Our second child came upon us early in that year, nearly 41 years ago this month.

We returned from the hospital to the wood fired cottage, if you like, that had the composting toilet situated in one small closeted room, which had to be cleaned by hand, periodically, if you've ever gone that route, you know what I mean.

I recall cutting a hole into the center of the wall between the living and bedroom to allow the heat to flow

We got to the point where the recession of 1982 was pretty deep in Ohio. I knew there was something I had to do as I was working outside of my profession.

So we had an exodus again. This time we moved many states away to the southeast in the subtropics to Boca Raton. There there was plenty of work.

I worked in my profession and ended up at a very prominent architect's office on the main strip in Boca. Twice we had made passage from one place to another to escape the distress of the situation. Certainly both were ordeals to confront.

Our third child came along towards the end of the third year after Stacey had had two miscarriages in a city that seemed not receptive to attending to patients without maternity medical insurance policies. I recall that I had to work the bingo shift at a local church to help defer some of the costs.

And it's not understandable why two miscarriages happened, but for whatever the reason, our life proceeded. So there was a pause for about three and half years before the third child came into being.

Emma Elise

It was in today's society, living in a state where they have a six week ban on abortion and also, if they were able to pass that extreme legislation again, my wife, with her two miscarriages, probably, probably would not be able to receive the medical attention given the law, the extremist legislators had passed and continue to try to inflict on women all over the state.

The state of Florida has this similar legislation today. It's really a shame to think what a woman has to go through from these arcane laws men seem to like to put into place.

Emma Mae (Elise) was born to us in the summer of the mid 80s in Florida. Within eight days we moved to back to Ohio to escape what we thought was a threat, certainly a distress of seeing on the kindergarteners exterior lockers and the elementary school.

“We have the right to inspect all lockers for guns and drugs”, posted right on the locker themselves.

Back to familiar grounds in Ohio with its cold winters, cloudy, cloudy days with our third child in tow in that old yellow Volvo stopping at my Aunt Mae's in Montgomery, Alabama, where there was no crib. Obviously that was understandable having to return.

So Aunt Mae took out her dresser drawer, padded it nicely, and little Emma slept her eighth night in that crib of a dresser drawer.

Luca Augustine

Our next child was born to us late in the decade of the 80s, and he was born in Lancaster, Ohio. His grandfather was ecstatic for whatever reason. Maybe the patriarchy with the last name was constant on his mind, but it gave him happiness, as it did us as well.

So we had a family of four children. Luca Augustine was somewhat free of the ordeals his sisters had experienced as babies. He was welcomed in the neighborhood with signage of welcoming a brand new baby in a new neighborhood, with blue ribbons and the promise of a good life to come.

The neighborhood, however, seemed to become disingenuous, when they learned of our faith and political leanings, which seems to have exploded since into an apparent divisive age today in the U S of A.

Zoetic Message

So this all relates to Christmas in this way. As I understand it, it becomes a zoetic message. And that is this:

We have a time where certain elements of people want a nationalist religious state. And it seems, as I listened to the gunfire outside, that this is not the intent nor the understanding we should have of Christmas. It's based on the birth of a baby into a world of domination and religious differences, of authoritarianism and all the kinds of things that are being recycled today.

However the purpose of the birth of the Christ-child was to bring hope, loving understanding, peace into a world that needed it, desperately. While we reflect on the 8th day of that birth, we reflect on the ordeals and distresses of the babies of everyone's families.

We could try more at obtaining the peace and love of the Christ and reduce our actions of killing multiple people with firearms, or despicable remarks, or extreme legislation.

If we just collectively would sit down, think it through, decide to act more responsibly, in responsible, moral, fruitful avenues, we would be able to celebrate all 12 days of Christmas every year with bliss.

Thanks for reading and or listening to A Zoetic Message.