It's 11 o'clock in the morning and Vendor of the Week was due two hours ago. Mike Hall is waiting with a puzzled smile as I rush around the office, looking for the camera that should have been in its case.
"Just a second," I say, "It's gotta be somewhere around here."
Hall nods, taps a finger on my desk: "No sweat."
I've just learned that Hall is no stranger to photographs: a picture of Hall wound up winning an Issaquah arts competition. A few years before that, a semi-truck hit a pagoda in Pioneer square; Mike, who happened to be at the square, was photographed by the Seattle Times.
"The next day I walked by a newspaper stand, turned around, and looked again--sure enough: front page," he remembered.
In other words, Hall is probably Real Change's most famously photographed vendor; as a fixture of the Elliott Bay Book Co., he is one of Seattle's most recognized and recognizable faces.
And I can't even find the camera.
"Sorry," I say, laughing though I don't feel like laughing. "Should be lying around here somewhere." Seattle has been Hall's home (where he was "born and bred"). Working in the lumber industry has brought him to Montana, Oregon, and California as a forklift operator. When Hall's arthritis became a problem, he made his way to Seattle and has been selling Real Change ever since.
He has become so well-known, such an integral part of the community, in fact, that when the van he lived in burned a few years ago, area businesses raised upwards of $2,000 to buy him a new one.
I'm thinking about all this as I check literally every drawer in the office. Hall will wait, nonplussed, until I find the camera under my desk. When we go outside it's gray and rainy.
"Smile," I'll tell him, "if you feel like it."