Speaking in tongues, through Buddy.

Prelude:

A few years ago, local businessman Buddy Davis and I decided to start writing our stories down. Buddy has been in many odd discussions with life by living it to the fullest. This is his story through my mouth. I wrote this like a mad man, so it will probably be very confusing. I guess that’s life. The story is about how Buddy Davis made an old woman feel weird.

Pre-Run
Story by Buddy Davis
Written by Charlie Marks, 2008.

What goes on in the minds of old people? Are they constantly thinking of how they are getting screwed by the younger generation? I wonder what their thought stream is. I can predict it is a balance between apples, social security, and how awesome it is to just block everything out of their brain that matters and be concerned with the most trivial effects in life like arguing that the color red isn’t how it used to be. Old people love apples. We all love what we can’t have. Do colors evolve like old people? Is the red of today the same as the red of the 50s? The only way to find out is to become old—but when you become old nobody believes you anyway. It’s a big cycle. The one thing I know is that old people love when things shake up their lives; it gives them something to talk about. That’s my job.

I came back from a run in the state park next to my high school. I was decompressing like a steam engine, tired but relaxed and refreshed. Is Tomas the Tank Engine his full name? If he is a tank engine, wouldn’t that be assumed? People don’t call me Buddy the Human Being because I am a human being. Tomas is an arrogant prick. Even the little kids who watch the show know that Tomas is a tank engine; I mean kids are stupid but I would like to think they can tell the difference between a human being and a tank engine. Now telling the difference between other tank engines; that’s a challenge—especially being a human.

The run went well, but at that particular moment my engine spotting skills were a little off. It was a different kind of engine that approached our location—this one ran on gas, not steam. My buddy Joe Lavin, a fellow runner and proud owner of a 1983 grey Oldsmobile, serenely drives near me and the group of decompressing runners. My energy was like a plane not ready to land but yet touches the ground briefly. I decided in a most exempt movement to run straight at the moving vehicle as though I was in Die Hard—explosions following as I jump from the 9th story of federal building right on top of the Ronald Reagan Oldsmobile.

I was on the hood of the car staring down at my bewildered friend and noticed that my friend had curly Jackie Kennedy brown hair, telescope thick glasses, crusted eyes, and skin so loose and dry it could be sold on the half off chicken rack in the local Super Fresh if there were such an isle. I study Physics. In my studies I have never came across any device that can transform the looks and emotions of people the way Eurkle could transform into Stephane on the TGIF show Family Matters. I always trusted TV, but I will never be able to be convinced such a device exists. It does not. I could probably come up with such a thing, but I have stories to tell. My friend did not transform into an 80 year old woman. I was standing on a piece of metal that separated me from a 1983 Engine that belonged to a woman born about 60 years before the car.

It was too late. I was already on the car. There was nothing I could have done. It was fact. Not opinion, not an assumption, it was fact. So at the moment of realization I had two choices. I will tell you the first—the one I picked—you can assume the other.

I looked at the woman as though I was looking into the eye of Aaron Burr or Clint Eastwood. I drew first. I walked from the front of the car—feeling with each step the amount of pressure applied to its grey painted metal until I was on the other end of the bumper. I walked right over the old biddies car and found myself on the other side. The woman kept driving—excited to tell her heart playing friends and uninterested husband the news of her day, as I walked nonchalantly to the rest of the team who watch with great excitement and much dismay. I guess the woman was used to her government walking all over her, that a fit track runner seemed like a good change of pace. My friends, the fellow runners said I was crazy. I said it was nothing. I was wrong and they were right. Like true craziness, it was not pre-mediated. It was me.

If Tomas wants to be specific he would be preferred to be called Tomas the Blue Tank Engine. But who needs do to specific? If life were a series of specifications I would be specific in mentioning how random it could be. That old woman loved me. Her love for that moment is as large as the amount of time she complains about it.