Crowded tables

My favorite thing to do these days of waiting to hear when and how my illness will kill me and to what degree it ruin my body before it does is taking a shower.
I take two quick showers, one when I wake up, another before going to bed. As brief as they are, they're delightful. The change from dry to wet, then dry again. And showering is a minor, pleasant form of work that feels good. Getting clean takes just enough concentration to take my mind off being ill, but not so much that it's hard to do.
Another comforting thing is eating. Not so much the eating, but preparing the food and getting things ready. If you've ever fasted completely for just one day, you were probably surprised by how much free time you had that day. Modern humans need far less time than ever before to attain sustenance, but when factoring the decisions and shopping in with the preparing and cleaning up afterward, we spend more time around food than we think we do.
Today I had a test, a pet scan, so breakfast was out. I'm not overweight but I can easily miss a meal, yet I found myself internally whining like a child over having to skip breakfast. It seems that I have something medical going on every two weeks that makes me have to limit or skip meals.

A breakfast cafe at a farmers market.

After the test, which took about two hours, I made up for my trifling deprivation by having breakfast at a local farmers market. I seldom go to it but it's a very good place. It used to be the only grocery store in town and the first time I went was probably when I was an infant, carried by my mother, nearly sixty years ago. 
The tables were crowded. I asked an older man who was seated alone if I could share his table. He was fine with that. His son came by later, a man in his early forties, I'd guess, who grew up here and now lives in Colorado. The father, Larry, was a friendly, chatty eighty-five year old. He's originally from New York but moved to this area—Southeastern Pennsylvania—in the 1970s. He asked how long I'd lived in the area and I gave him the simple answer of all my life; nearly sixty years. There was no need to go into the years abroad and other cities.
"When you're eighty-five," Larry said, "sixty sounds like a teenager."
My impulse was to tell him that while I'm sure that's true, my odds of living to be eighty-five, or even sixty-two, are slim.
I said nothing, of course. My pancakes had arrived and tasted too good for me to want to ruin the moment.