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Cecil, Vendor of the Week.
Photo by J.P. Gritton |
A couple hours before copy was due, I sent an email to Cecil, this week’s Vendor of the Week; attached was what was then his profile. By way of response, he sent a 500-word clarification. Not that he didn’t like what I’d written, per se — but as a great man once put it, “People take their lives personally.” His own words were more honest, truer, and plain better than what I had. So here they are. —JP Gritton
I’m a jack-of-all-trades; before I did Real Change, I’d been a construction worker, commercial fisherman, merchant marine, jeweler. I can scrap a full sized truck with a sledgehammer, a chisel, and a crowbar in two hours. As far as work goes, I’m a “traveler,” I “boom-out,” I go where the work is. [Cecil still “booms around” Ballard-area markets to sell the paper.]
One day there wasn’t any longshoreman work to be found, and I found Real Change. I saw a way to make ends meet in between jobs; add to that the fact you can sell Real Change when it suits your schedule — it can be hard to keep a job when you have to take care of family. So it works for me: if there’s no work, I sell Real Change. [Though, as most people can probably guess, selling the paper isn’t all sunshine and rainbows — a few passersby have chided Cecil to “get a job.” His response? “I don’t need a job — I have a business.”]
Nobody in Seattle should be hungry. There’s good food being thrown away every day from stores, and sometimes the food banks don’t have the room to store it all. [Through the paper, Cecil has experienced up-close the tribulations of Seattle’s homeless — and now distributes food in his free time: “a little help,” he calls it.]
We’re all lights. Some just need a little wind to blow the fog away.
— Story by Cecil. |
