From Sonora to Shibuya

In a  city with 23 million people, you will never guess what happened to us.  We were walking on the street in Kunitachi and a Japanese guy stopped us and asked Trevor, in English, his name.  We thought it was weird, but then the recognition was almost instantaneous for all of us.  We had been stopped by our old friend Kaz who was an exchange student from the junior college we went to in my hometown (500 people).  We hadn`t seen him for 10 years!  And get this, he just happened to be in Kunitachi doing a delivery favor for a friend -- he actually lives and works in Ikebekuro, a good 45 minutes from Kunitachi with a train change.
 
When Kaz went to school with us, he lived in an A-frame in a nearby town called Sonora with 4-5 other skaters/snowboarders.  This house was known as "the A-frame" in the party circuit in Tuolumne County; in fact, we still refer to it as such when talking to anybody from Sonora who is that OG.  All the parties there were always totally wild, and more than once I witnessed a large appliance being thrown from the icy deck or a riot in the kitchen when the keg arrived.
 
Our best story about Kaz was the time he stopped for gas late at night and some gangster kids started calling him shit like "slant-eye."  Kaz didn`t  get upset, just minded his own business, UNTIL they spit on his car.  He told them to meet him around the corner after he paid for his gas.  Kaz told us that he was thinking to himself, what the hell should I do?  He had studied kickboxing, so the first thing he did when he came around the corner was crack the first guy he saw over the nose.  Blood went everywhere, and the other guys took off. 
 
Kaz is married now, with a 7 month old that weighs 10 kilograms!  We`re checking out his friend`s band tonight with him in Shibuya.   Crazy!