The Marco Buscaglia Years

Daddy's little whirl: Facing the teen years, ready or not

Isabella turns 13 today. Similar to Eliot's birthday yesterday, it's another milestone to ponder as my daughter enters her teen years. And of course, as my wife jokingly but accurately puts it, it gives me another chance to write about myself. 

 It's a ciche to say it all goes by in a blur, but it's true. One day, you're making a late-night trek to Jewel for diapers and forumla. The next, three of your four children are teenagers.

I have mixed feelings about my children getting older. I embrace the boys’ birthdays, knowing that they’re reference points as Eliot and Owen move toward their goals in life, whatever they may be. Plus, it’s one year closer to controllable grocery bills. But I’m not quite sure I’m as happy to see the girls move from year to year. I’m not sure if this is based on some controlling aspect of my personality or some biased views on gender. Maybe it’s just me having trouble with the possibility of eventually letting go, watching them embark on their path, which leads out of my front door. 

My oldest daughter turns 13 today, officially a teenager. But as anyone with daughters knows, there are no overnight changes when it comes to raising young women. Isabella has shown signs of fierce independence at times. Her younger sister is the same. I attribute this to my wife, a strong working mother who has to balance students with special needs at school and time- and attention-demanding children at home. 

Before our children were born, I worried a lot about raising girls. Raise them to be sweet and passive, and they could get mistreated by boys and walked on at work. Raise them to be confident and aggressive, and they could get ostracized by fellow students and labeled by employees. I know there is a way to raise them that keeps a foot in both camps. I still struggle with finding it but Cathy knows what it is. 

Cathy has always been a “grab-the-keys-and-get-it-done” kind of mother, warm and loving with her children but not to the point of absurdity. Lousy tests or behavioral issues aren’t hugged away. They’re dealt with head on. And when it’s time to snuggle after a bad day, I end up on the couch. Our bed becomes a makeshift all-girls club and I’m the odd man out. I’m fine with that. I’m glad the girls have a great relationship with their mother. I’m glad they can look to her as someone who can figure things out without waiting for someone else to step in, just as I’m happy that they don’t bother me to watch “Dance Moms” with them. That’s Cathy’s role, thankfully. 

Gaining a sense of confidence in their own abilities is important but I don’t want to be the one praising and pampering them the entire journey. I’m there to build them up but I want them to gain their confidence through their abilities and effort so when the idiots they encounter later in life try to tear them down, they’ll have more than enough inherent self-esteem to offer up a hearty ‘f_ you’ and be on their way. But it’s hard. You want to spoil them. An occasional  “Please, Daddy!” and you're entirely malleable. They’re your little girls and you want to treat them like royalty. But I learned early on that girls who are raised like princesses don’t grow up to be queens. They grow up to be something else entirely.

All aspects of Izzy’s personality are served well by the current focus of her life, which is dance. Like many three-year-old girls, Izzy took ballet early. She has stuck with it for almost a decade now, moving to a new company this past fall, all the while continuing to work hard to improve her skills.

Dance has never been about competitions or awards for Isabella, never been about the trophies and plaques – “I hate competitions,” she told me as we pulled into a competition parking lot earlier this year. Dance has always been about the camaraderie she feels with her teachers and her fellow dancers. When she was old enough to realize she had a talent, it became about becoming a better dancer, embracing her art, finding her footing, in a figurative and literal way. It’s hard for me to say what she’s capable of if she continues to work hard. Even if she's an amazing dancer when she's older, she'll be one of many. I see wonderful dancers her own age and younger all the time. There will be plenty in the talent pool when it comes time to apply to schools and beyond. But as long as she enjoys doing it, Cathy and I are fully behind her. I tell her that if she chooses to follow dance as a career path, she may have struggles most people won’t understand but that in dedicating herself to her art, she’ll have rewards they’ll never touch.

If, as an outsider, you looked at her schedule, you might think she gives too much up – school activities, time with friends – but I know she doesn’t see it that way. She enjoys rehearsals, performances and the downtime she gets with her fellow dancers. She’s fortunate to be taught by an amazingly talented teacher who cares about her as a person as much as she does about her as a dancer. Izzy’s always had great teachers who took that approach, in fact. She’s learned a lot from them. She’s been very lucky.  

In the past year, Isabella has shown amazing signs of maturity. She can be incredibly self-sufficient, fair minded and motivated. She's not afraid to leave her comfort zone, not afraid to be the new girl. And she’s a kind person – I’ll ignore some at-home exchanges with her brothers and sister. We aren’t the Brady Bunch, after all  – who has maintained friendships with people who enter her life at various stages.

Two summers ago, I became acutely aware that as parents, Cathy and I were entering the onset of the end of Isabella’s childhood. She went to a ballet camp in Michigan for two weeks with one of her close friends and had a hard time adjusting. We did go up to see her in the middle of the camp, but the phone calls from her before and after our visit were tough. We really questioned if we did the right thing. Were we forcing her to grow up too soon?

One night in particular really tested that question.

My children do not handle storms well and toward the middle of ballet camp, a huge storm hit the campus where the students were staying. It was a mess of a night. The dancers had to evacuate their rooms and retreat to the basement to wait out the tornado sirens. When she returned to her room after midnight, she called us, crying, still unable to sleep because of the storms outside. After my wife calmed her down, I had her put the phone on her pillow and I read her Shel Silverstein poems – a nighttime staple for us – for what seemed like an hour. Eventually, she told me she was fine, that she was tired, that she’d be able to fall asleep. After hanging up, I stayed up for another three hours, watching the yellow, orange and red bursts of activity batter Michigan’s coast, including right where she was. She never called back.

I felt like I was in the middle of her transformation, like this might be the last time my voice and some poems from “The Light in the Attic” would soothe her.

Prior to leaving for camp that summer, Izzy and Julia would always sleep in the same bed, even if they started out separately. As excuses to sleep together, they’d use the possibility of thunder and lightening, the fact that there was no school the next day or the piles of clothes on one of the beds. No matter the situation when the night started, the morning always ended up the same – both girls in the top or bottom bunk.

The first Monday morning after Isabella returned from ballet camp, I stopped in their room for a quick glimpse, like I did every morning when I left for work in the summer. Isabella was on the top bunk and her younger sister was on the bottom, both sound asleep despite the July morning sun pushing through their shades. I noticed that Isabella had already thumb-tacked the photo of her ballet camp group to her bulletin board.

Seeing her sleep in her bed alone in the sunlight made me a little happy and made me a little proud but mostly, it broke my heart.

-Marco Buscaglia

 

 

16 and counting: Measuring a life in small and large moments

My oldest son turned 16 today. A milestone age, I guess, if only for the freedom to drive to and from places you’ll lie about to your parents later. It makes me a bit sentimental, sure, but  I’m happy to see him grow up, happy to see our relationship evolve as we both get older.
My wife had a fairly tumultuous pregnancy with Eliot toward the end of 1995 and into 1996, going into early labor three months before he was due, at one point, her contractions about two minutes apart. That early labor, along with some fibroid issues and some preeclampsia on side, resulted in a few days in the hospital and several weeks of bed rest. But after 16 hours of labor and three hours of pushing, our first child was born at 11:51 p.m. on March 8. Months, weeks, hours and minutes of activity seemed to immediately fade as we held our calm, quiet boy in the hospital room. His calmness continued as after we took him home – great sleeper, great eater, rarely cried. Eliot was a wonderful baby, always happy and always curious. I wanted to write something profound about him as he turns 16 but instead, I’ve found something I wrote after his first season of tee ball in 2000. It sums up Eliot at four and, in many ways, Eliot at 16:

I’m not sure when a person starts to measure time in actual numbers, but using baseball as a model isn’t helpful, especially to a four-year-old boy.
“Do I have to stay the whole time, daddy? Can I just stay for a little bit? Not the whole time  — just a little bit?”
Asking my son for “a little bit” was the best I could do. One “inning” meant nothing to Eliot, and I had no idea how long a tee ball game lasted, so that was our deal: “Just a little bit.” And after Eliot’s first game of tee ball, after watching my four-year-old son cry through 90 minutes of instructional hit-the-ball-off-the-tee Americana, my wife and I decided he could stick it out as long as he wanted to, even if it was “just a little bit.”
Watching his face that first week, I could tell he thought it would never end – the unfamiliar kids, the loud adults, the itchy jersey and the too-big hat. It was too much. He started whimpering before he even took the field, before he even had a chance to meet his teammates and his coaches. By the time he started fielding ground balls, it was all-out sobbing. Like father, like son.
I was the crying kid on my tee ball team – the same kid who cried his first five nights at summer camp, the one who cried his way through pre-school and the boy who used to get a stomach ache from stress before he had to head to mandatory football practice at Portage Park.
And there stood my oldest son, wiping tears off his face and rocking front-to-back, oblivious to the genuine (but still annoying) “Is he all right?” questions from the other attending parents.
My legacy was intact.
I was determined to raise my sons to be more confident, more involved than I was as a boy but I realized I was failing. In theory, I wanted each of my sons to avoid that pitch-black feeling a kid gets in his gut when he lacks the confidence to participate. Unlike me, I didn’t want them dreading the Saturday-morning game, pushing together 10 Our Fathers before bed Friday night, praying for a thunder-and-lightening storm of biblical proportions.
I wanted my sons to be confident, the ones who could swing and pitch and pass and shoot. But in this, Eliot’s first organized sport, I was faced with my own past. For him, like me, tee ball started out as a grueling task. But unlike me, he worked his way through it. 

At first, Eliot was excited to sign up, telling everyone who would listen about his new endeavor. But that all went away when he woke up on the morning of his first game. He cried when he saw his uniform laid out on the couch. He cried when we put him in the car. He cried when he saw other kids who were his age, his height, wearing the same jersey.
Instructional tee ball is the very first level of baseball at Oriole Park, the Chicago Park District closest to my house, so practices and games are rolled into one. Teams show up at 9 a.m. on Saturday mornings from May until the end of July. They work on the fundamentals for about 45 minutes, then they play ball.
On that first Saturday in May, Eliot cried while watching four- and five-year-old kids laugh and play around backstops and water fountains, all the while kicking dirt and wearing their mitts on their heads. When the game finally ended, after 90 minutes of sobs that could be heard above the chirping sounds of summer, Eliot grabbed a snack, sat on the end of the bench to be near his family and stared at the backstop until it was time to leave.
Later, he’d tell us he was fine. That he’d try hard not to cry next week. That he just didn’t know when the game would be over, that’s all. But where do you draw the line as parents? Sure, my wife and I knew he’d benefit in the long run if he stuck it out, but at what price?
He cried when he woke up on the morning of his second game. He put on his White Sox jersey and cried more. He took the field and continued to sob. He played through one inning. Cathy and I were ready to tell him to come to the bench, to tell him sit with us until he settled down. But he was silent. He played the second inning. He turned quiet and attentive. He batted. He smiled.
As we were getting into the car after the game, I asked him why he stopped crying.
“I don’t know,” he said, almost surprised I would ask such an silly question. “I just stopped.”
My wife, who was buckling in our youngest son on the other side, caught my glance. For all the observations you make of your children as they get older, as you pack away their clothes in the basement and watch them color between the lines, you nearly miss out on their true growth. And then a comment from your four-year-old stuns you into a temporary silence.
“I just stopped.”

Soon, Eliot found a set of professional big brothers. He would get excited when he saw a Sox game on TV.
“Is that the big White Sox or the little White Sox” when he saw the South Side logo on a billboard. “Maybe I’ll grow up to be on the big White Sox.”
I’m was glad that he recognized his team, but I had to remind him we lived on the Northwest Side of Chicago.
“We’re Cubs fans, E, take it easy.”
Eliot received wonderful coaching in tee ball. Two guys from the neighborhood ran the team, telling the attending parents on Saturday mornings about their hangovers and the players about Pokemon. Eli was taught how to swing the bat, how to move to the ball, how to use his mitt and numerous other baseball fundamentals, but after a season of games, did he appreciate any of that? Maybe. But he told me that he liked Coach Tim because he always gave him “five” when he made it to second base and liked Coach John because he “pushed my hat down over my eyes.” Good enough for me.
By the end of the season, Eliot was already talking about next year, about when Owen joins the team, about Isabella’s chances to play the game. Now, he gets impatient when I carry my daughter around in the yard or play soccer with my son because he wants to be the hitter when I’m the pitcher.
I know that new tears will surface next spring, but at least he’ll have a reference point – the games do end, he will have fun, he’ll make new friends. And soon, preschool probably will cause us to re-live the tee ball trauma, but we now know it will pass.
I just want him out there. He may commit an error a game. I just want him to be a part of a team. He knows that there’s always something scary about the new, something frightening about the unknown. But he’s also learned that it’s important to try new things, that it’s essential to find out things for himself.

Eliot played park district baseball for several seasons after that but he would admit that it wasn’t a sport in which he excelled. And at an early age, Eliot was bothered by the tear-down approach of some little league baseball coaches, so when the game stopped being fun, he stopped playing. He dabbled in football and basketball as well, and today plays high school volleyball, all while taking honors and AP classes at a high school that pushes him toward great things. More importantly, he seems to get it, whatever it is. He has a deep understanding of right and wrong and is willing to defend his opinions. He's not perfect by any means, but I'm fairly humbled at how good of a kid he really is. Both he and his brother have an amazing ability to let life proceed at its normal pace. They let things come to them and don't succumb to pressure to do otherwise. Blessed with a great group of friends, both Eliot and Owen get the "life is a marathon" thing we've talked about since they were young. Whether or not you're a starter on your seventh-grade basketball team may seem like a big deal at the time, but it's a midpoint in the first mile or so of your life. They get that. Eliot has the long view on everything. It's helpful for me, in my sometimes check-to-check way of seeing things, to see someone who understands that it isn't life or death if he doesn't do well on a geometry test. That's it's more important to re-establish patterns and habits that will help him down the road.  
I still see those same four-year-old eyes when I look at him now. On occasion, I see traces of anxiety and fear, but more than anything else, his eye reflect a definite calm and a quiet sense of emerging confidence, something not easily achieved in a chaotic household of six, with dinners on the go, late-night studying, constant shuffling to and from Point A and Point B and parents who are brutally honest with their children when it comes to finances, stress, expectations and decency. Sometimes that calmness manifests itself in ways that make me mad. It can create a backdrop for bursts of sarcasm that fuel occasional bouts of paternal anger within me, even if I find myself laughing about what he said several hours later. But my guess is that his serene personality will serve him well, even if it drives his family crazy. After all, there is something positive about a level-headed approach to life, managing the ups and downs with the same attitude of “Don’t worry about it. I’ll figure it out.”

-Marco Buscaglia

I'll be reading at Sunday Salon Chicago on Jan. 29

If you’re looking for something to do this Sunday evening, I’ll be reading a short story at Sunday Salon Chicago, a monthly reading series that features local writers. The event will be held at 7 p.m. at Black Rock, which is 3614 N. Damen, in Chicago. It’s a bar, so if the thought of being surrounded by all those English majors you mocked in college makes you uncomfortable, you can have a beer or two to settle your nerves. 

Also reading that night will be Christine Sneed and Billy Lombardo, who together form an impressive duo of Chicago authors. Listening to either of them would make your trip more than worthwhile.

Christine Sneed, one of my instructors in grad school who really helped me gain confidence as a writer, has received a ton of praise for her recent collection of short stories, “Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry.” The book includes, “Quality of Life,” which was chosen for the “Best American” series in 2009. She’s a great teacher and a wonderful writer. The characters in her stories are always very real. When I read them, I feel like I’ve received some insight into those people in my own life I only thought I knew. 

If he isn’t already, Billy Lombardo will should be required reading for any high school or college “Chicago Literature” course. Great stories, great settings, great characters. His short story, “The Wallace Playlot,” still blows me away every time I read it. If you’re looking for a great baseball book that’s only kind of about baseball, check out his novel, “The Man with Two Arms.”  

The event will also help raise some money for Polyphony H.S., an international student-run literary magazine for high school writers. Haiyun Cho and Rachel Stone, two contributors to Polyphony H.S., will read as well. 

So, Sunday night at Black Rock for an hour or so instead of watching the Pro Bowl or “America’s Funniest Home Videos.” Hope to see you there.

 

 

 

Gacyville, USA

Flipping through the channels a couple of weeks ago, I came across “Gacy,” a film starring Mark Holton as the notorious serial killer. Holton isn’t a bad John Wayne Gacy, but it’s hard to t ake him seriously after seeing his previous work as Pee-wee Herman’s nemesis in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” Chubby, the fat kid in “Teen Wolf” and Enrico Pallazzo, the tied-up opera singer in one of “The Naked Gun” movies.

Still, there were moments in the film that came close to getting at the core of what made Gacy so ubiquitous – the faux friendships, the good neighbor act – and so evil – the rope trick, the evil intentions. It’s possible to see how someone so visible could have committed acts so brutal.

I grew up in a neighborhood a couple of miles away from Gacy’s Norwood Park Township house and was 10 when they discovered the bodies in the crawlspace of his house on Summerdale. At some point, anyone who lived within 10 miles of Gacy had a Gacy story – a guy I knew used to walk his dog, another friend’s mom cut his hair, he used to come to local baseball picnics dressed as a clown – things like that. After 29 bodies were removed from his basement and crawlspace, most of them decomposed and covered in lime to hide the odor, the structure was torn down and the yard was completely excavated.

Gacy’s empty lot was one of the must-sees when friends visited Chicago from New York or Texas. I’d drive them down Summerdale, pointing out the local attraction with no more emotion than I would point out the Hancock Building or Wrigley Field. Of course, I knew all about the horrible things that happened there, but it was a novelty at best, a little piece of trivia located a couple miles from my house.

When we were in high school, we’d sometimes drive by the empty lot at night. We’d dare each other to stand in the middle of the lot while the remaining passengers circled the block. I remember this as terrifying and exhilarating, but still more of a novelty than anything else. You’d wait for your friends to come back and pick you up or for a neighbor to come out and yell at you to go away. Still, it was frightening. Anyone who’d get back in the car would be pretty shaken up, but again, I think it was the idea of the 45 seconds of terror that gave us the rush, the handful of dirt from the yard tucked in a pocket, a bragged-about souvenir of potential human remains. The reality of what actually happened there was still the stuff of newspaper articles and TV news clips, not of reality.

Later, I remember watching a house being built on the lot, and seeing it completed when I came home for a weekend from college. The house was always dark and looked out of place because of its suburban design in a neighborhood of brick ranches. I thought it was odd but that was it. Someone built a house on Gacy’s lot. Creepy. Who could possibly there? Again, a novelty.

Fast-forward to 1997. My wife and I bought our first house, the house where we still live, on the northwest side of the city. When most people – relatives, friends from work – asked about our new house, it was no big deal. But my friends from my neighborhood usually said something like, “Summerdale? You bought a house on Summerdale? Are you kidding?”

Our house is about five blocks east from Gacy’s on Summerdale Avenue. Even though my wife and I read some of the books covering the case, mostly for morbid curiosity and the novelty of seeing the names of places we were familiar with in print, it didn’t seem like a big deal. The neighborhood was exactly what we wanted. Gacy’s house was an afterthought.

Back in 1997, we closed on the house on Oct. 31, Halloween. It was a Friday. The movers were coming on Saturday but since we now had the keys, we stopped by our new home. It was about 9 p.m. when we pulled up to the house. The first thing we noticed was a group of kids all ghouled out in black clothes and white face makeup, prepared for a night of shaving cream, eggs and toothpaste, all the good-natured Halloween antics you participate in once you’re too old to trick or treat. That in and of itself was kind of unsettling — not exactly the welcome wagon we were looking for – but I spent plenty of Halloweens covered in Barbasol as a kid, so no big deal. At the time, we had two sons whose ages were still measured in months, not years, so Cathy decided to stay in the car with them while they slept and I walked up to the house. I turned on a few lights, walked through some of the rooms and enjoyed that moment of, “Yes, this is home. We did it.”

Then I walked down to the basement.

It was unfinished at the time so most of what I saw was exposed brick, mortar and cinderblock from the light of the one hanging bulb. But when I saw the brickline outlining the crawlspace in the front of the house, I’m was nearly paralyzed.

It was the single most frightening moment of my life, like all my John Wayne Gacy jokes and little field trips and curiosities backfired on me at once. I just stood by the stairs, waiting for the feeling of doom that had just surrounded me to subside.

It did not. My brain was churning out more regrets than I could process.

“What did I just do? What was I thinking? I can’t live on Summerdale. I can’t live this close to Gacy’s house? I have two sons. What am I doing? We have to move.”

It was as if the totality of all the murders, the rope-trick captures, the alcohol-induced invites, the vicious rapes, the sadistic tortures and the late-night burials punched me in the gut. I was devastated. We pooled every financial resource we had to come up with a down payment and signed our lives away for a mortgage that doubled our rent, and it was all a mistake — a glaring mistake.   

I told Cathy about the Gacy thoughts when I got back in the car but I didn’t admit how freaked out I was. She assured me that I’d get over it and it would be fine. I didn’t believe her. Once we moved in, I’d go in the basement alone at night and get completely spooked. I thought I could desensitize myself to the Gacy thoughts by sitting there, going through what he’d done. I’m not sure if that process worked, but the need to move to a different house faded. We finished one half of the basement to cover the cinder and brick, and slowly, the basement began to feel like home as much as the rest of the house. 

 

The following summer, a neighbor had a small mountain of dirt left over from a landscaper earlier in the day, and correctly assumed that I would want the dirt to cover a dog-run left by the previous owners. He and I wheel-barreled it over to our front yard. Knowing it would rain in the morning, I decided to spread the dirt out over the dog-run that night, now that the gravel had been removed. About 20 minutes into it, my neighbor came back outside by to see if I needed help. I declined and offered a macabre aside.

“I know. No digging allowed on Summerdale at night.”

The phrase just kind of sat there until my neighbor, a lifelong Northwest Side resident with children of his own, laughed.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “Just don’t start spreading lime.”

I was relieved. It was OK to joke – or at least talk about ­– the horrible tragedies that took place a few blocks away. I began to realize the enormity of what had happened there in 1978 and beforehand, started to sense the real impact of Gacy’s horrendous actions.

Today, nearly 13 years later, we still live in the same house on Summerdale. I’ve reconciled whatever fears I had in the past and actually convinced myself that there must be some sort of positive energy from the boys who were killed, an unseen presence that still exists in the neighborhood, possibly manifesting itself by becoming a force that looks out for others, silently pushing those in danger toward safety, away from any evil.

Of course, it does help that our basement is now completely finished, outfitted in berber carpet, beige walls and white trim. And a few years ago, we finished the crawlspace, cementing the dirt floor and sealing off the walls, making the low-ceiling space a usable place for storage. 

Still, cement, drywall and carpet may create a barrier but there will always be ghosts in our neighborhood, the spirits of teenage boys longing for girls never approached, dwelling on math homework never completed.

-Marco Buscaglia

 

Christmas poems - with apologies to Shel Silverstein

When the kids were younger, I would read them little Christmas poems I'd written. Here are a few of them, with artwork by Isabella and Julia Buscaglia

Lights out

It’s time to put up Christmas lights.
Those magic bulbs that shine at night.
These ones are dull and these are bright.
And these? Well, they just don’t seem right.

Dad says to go out in the snow.
“Untangle this one! That one! Go!
And lay them all out in a row!”
Then dad yells stuff we shouldn’t know.

Hey, dad, that’s not a Christmas word.
Why did you flip the lights the bird?
The neighbors think dad’s just absurd.
It’s a good thing that mom hasn’t heard:

-The words dad has for lights that blink
-That thing he screams instead of “stink.”
-His awful term for lights turned pink.
Man, that guy really is on the brink.

He’s on a bad-word yelling spree!
I think he’s up to 93.
I’ll make sure that he won’t find me.
When it’s time to put up the tree.

 

Batter up

It’s time to bake some cookies
It’s time to spread some cheer.
Go get the flour, eggs and milk
And bring them over here.

I think it needs vanilla.
Mmmm, nuts would make it dandy.
Add marshmallows, sugar, chocolate chips.
And don’t forget the candy.

Be sure to add those M&Ms,
To this delicious batter.
Anyone who eats a few of these
Should get a little fatter.

Oh, that’s pretty close to perfect.
I’m now the “Cookie Boss!”
Now if you please excuse me,
I’ve got my own cookies to toss.

 

Thank-CHOO!

I’m sorry these cards are late,
But I’ve got a nasty flu.
And as I sit to write these cards
I can’t help but … ACHOOO!

So thank you to Auntie Lisa
And thank you, Mrs. Lay.
Thanks to Uncle Anthony
And Ralph and Joe and Jay.

Sure, toys would have been great.
Perhaps some books to read?
Some drums, a bike, a DVD?
Heck, something I don’t need.

But you didn’t send me anything.
No games, no magic trick.
No puzzles I can play with
While I stay home all sick.

So if this card seems sticky,
Don’t give me any flak.
Hey, you didn’t give me nothin’
COUGH!
But I’m sending something back.

 

Boxing Day

England has a Boxing Day.
On December 26.
We could always use more fun. 
Why not add it to our mix?

Just imagine Muhammed Ali
Rope-a-doping through your door
George Foreman dressed in green and red
Piling gifts up on your floor. 

De La Hoya could drive the sleigh
after Tyson packs the toys
And Lennox Lewis could keep track
Of all good girls and boys.

Then again, that doesn’t seem quite right.  
Boxing’s not the way to go.
Let’s have a Wrestling Day instead
And do piledrivers in the snow!

-Marco Buscaglia