Puddle Man. What a guy. No idea who he was. I used to deliver pizza in Seattle, downtown. Cool job, got to know the whole city. As you probably know, it rains here often. There's a stretch of old highway 99, aka Aurora Ave, just barely North of downtown where the road starts to change from a highway into a city street. Old hotel there that has too many stories for comfort. Also, importantly, a dip in the road over by the curb where rainwater would pool during heavy precipitation. Puddle Man would stand right there, on the corner, in the rain. Right next to the fast moving highway and the large pool of rainwater on the road. We saw him all the time. Puddle Man was fat - really fat, and he wore a yellow rain slicker with the hood up. Sometimes he was under an umbrella. You know, because he didn't want to get rained on. Pretty sensible. Oh, except he forgot to button the rain slicker up. And he forgot to wear pants. Puddle Man would stand right there for hours, in the perfect spot to get COMPLETELY SOAKED by the huge bow waves of water that would be splashed up by all the cars driving past. Calmly, facing the street, no expression on his face, rain bouncing from his hood or umbrella. Just letting the waves wash over him as car after car fwoomed through his puddle. It was weird, but it was awesome. It looked fun! I and the other pizza drivers would swerve toward him a little, just to get deeper into the dip and make a bigger wave. I almost knocked him off his feet during one particularly heavy downpour. I like to think that he appreciated that. He never seemed to get tired of it. Puddle Man was a weird cat with a weird habit, but he really had something figured out about life. Some 20 years later I still think about the guy, incongruous with his raincoat and umbrella, patient and zen as any other surfer as he waited for that next wave.