It was quite a predicament I was in. There I was on the bus one evening, heading east from Aki City to the nearby town of Yasuda. There was a kindly old woman sitting across from me, a bag of groceries by her side. There were my students, surrounding me, chatting to each other as they rode off to their respective homes. And there was my wallet, lying unassumingly on my dining table back home. Having peered into my bag and reached the conclusion derived from the above facts, I froze. Heart racing, mind reeling from the potential humiliation, I tried to find a solution. Asking one of my students for cash being far too compromising, I made a few phone calls and finally got a hold of my kenpo master. Five minutes later, there I was at my stop. And there he was, cigarette casually dangling from his mouth and a fist full of cash in his outstretched hand. In that moment he single-handedly saved me from almost certain embarrassment. Before I could obsequiously thank him for the tenth time, he was off, driving back along the country roads to resume the work he had begun prior: harvesting eggplants in his greenhouses.