Wear a stethoscope, start a conversation.
Waiting for my coffee at Ralph’s Café this morning, a middle-aged man with wiry white hair, sitting alone, sees my stethoscope and gesticulates as he calls out, “Hey, doc!”
Me? Merely two metres away, eye contact confirmed, he clearly isn’t talking to anyone else. Around his neck, resting on a faded blue polo shirt, hang a jumbled array of sharks’ teeth. An alarm that only I can hear rings loudly in both ears.
“Hi,” I say, smiling hesitantly and taking one step closer.
He left school at age 11, he soon tells me, and is in awe of someone studying for as long as it takes to become a doctor.