Detour Middlemore Hospital

I took the wrong bus on Friday. This slightly threw me off because I didn't have time to stop off at the cheap copy shop (5 cents) to run off some articles from all my gangster film books from the library.
I ended up taking the bus to Middlemore Hospital. I got off. I went inside and got a chai latte. The two girls at the coffee shop were cheerful and pleasant, but the service was incrediby slow. I browsed one of the gift shops owned by an Indian lady. I purchased a thank you gift for my fam bam here, a grey wooden placard with a blessing written on it. I waited while my chai was done, then I went out to wait for the bus going in the opposite direction.
Three school girls chattered away, and I noticed their different styles of talking: one was loud and even broke into song occasionally to dominate the floor. One was supportive, and offered laughter to punctuate the loud one's comments and stories. The third was silent and listened.
Soon, a man, maybe in his sixties came and sat down by me, he was in a robe and slippers, wearing glasses, holding a plastic to-go container of cut melons. It looked sanitized and dead (the fruit). In his other hand he had a pack of loose tobacco.
Without looking up at me, he says, "Its an awful place." Of course I know what he means: walking through the hallway with my chai latte, I smelt sickness, stagnant illness, and slow death brewing below....I could not smell the life.
He went on to conversate, he was hungry to share his story. I learnt he was an engineer, and before that he worked on ships and owned his own "trawler" sailing the seas. He told me he had patented this invention thingy that somehow made electricity from methane in sewers and that he made a lot of money selling the patents to companies that needed carbon credits. I wonder if he's crazy. (Crazy people are attracted to me, I don't know why). He tells me he's got some kind of vascular cancer, that its "springing leaks all over the place". He's found out just two months ago, and since then he has been coming in for days at a time for cancer treatments. A man in a blue sports coupe whizzes by the bus stop, where me, the school girls, the sick man sit waiting for Godot. The sick man says, "That's my doctor, in that blue car." And then, as an aside, "He lets me smoke..."
"....You don't know how lucky you are," he says and I shrink knowing that my morning was spent in my mind worrying about my damn photocopying and in irritation at my getting on the wrong bus.
"Do you have any children?" I ask.
"A son, he's in Australia, I haven't seen him in years. I've been trying to get ahold of him." His son is 22. His wife passed away a few years back.
An hour of waiting for the bus (Auckland buses are slow, unreliable I've noticed), my bus comes, I get up to leave. I can tell he still wants to talk. With a longing in my heart for peace of mind for this ex-engineer with cancer, I say, "Take care, it was nice talking to you."
The next day, I stop at the Mangere Presbyterian Church cemetary on my jog. The gravestones date from the turn of the century, many of them are immigrants from Scotland. I breath deeply. I let my thoughts slip away as I try to feel every bit of life that courses through me. You don't know how lucky you are, he said as he puffed a rolled cigarette...
The smell of death lingers with me.
I do know how lucky I am. I just don't always feel it...."Let me feel life," I pray to the crumbling gravestones.