SAM DECKER: Growing up, the storefront was Anderssen’s Shoes. An Anderssen was selling shoes there when my great-grandfather won the building in a poker game, and by my time, an Anderssen was still at it. If someone from back then had told me I’d be running a café there one day, I’d have looked at him slantwise and told him it would always be Anderssen’s store on the bottom and Meemaw’s apartment on top. Every day after school, I’d rocket those stairs to her waiting for me with a slice of fresh-baked bread. Meemaw wanted a college boy. I would have been first in the family, but I decided the army was my ticket to making it famous in photography. When I was a kid, Life magazine was all glossy pics of soldiers in uniform, the storming of the beaches. I wanted to be Robert Capa the way my pals wanted to be Joe DiMaggio. For my ninth birthday, Meemaw got me a subscription so I’d stop tearing out pages at the library. I got a Kodak Brownie the year after that. By fifteen, I’d saved enough for a beat-up secondhand Contax, which was the rig Capa used at Normandy.

I was halfway through high school when Korea came. I kept hoping it’d last long enough for me to join up, and then it did. Meemaw told me over and over how Capa and all the rest went to war as photojournalists, not soldiers. At seventeen, I wasn’t about to let that hold me back, even though I should have. Turns out you can’t shoot a camera and a gun at the same time, unless you want to do a half-assed job at both.

Sam’s Café has never been big with the high school crowd. I just play jazz. I don’t serve pop. In winter I close up too soon after school lets out to be any use, and that’s fine by me. I’m not running my place for them. Every now and then some kid will come anyways, and that’s how it started: with a St. Margaret’s girl, sitting in the corner beside the beaded lamp beneath the eight-by-ten of the park bench. I could’ve sworn I’d seen her before. I figured she belonged to somebody from the neighborhood who knew the score, because whenever I flashed the lights and called, Time, she packed up and headed out without a peep. Then it got to be January. It was maybe three-thirty and I was flashing the lights. She came over and asked me how come. I told her golden hour, same as any other day. She thought for a minute, then asked was I a photographer. That made me wonder if she was local after all. She wasn’t, she said, but her mom was, and happened to be a photographer, too. The girl pointed at the walls. Were those all mine? I had to get out to catch the light, but I said we could talk tomorrow. The next day she sat near the counter. She told me she and her mom had moved from Brooklyn. She liked that I did trees and buildings and fences, no people: it was the opposite of what her mom did, but she bet her mom would like my stuff. I explained how the inanimate objects were just backdrop. I take pictures of light, which human subjects are no good for. No one looks at a photograph with a tree in it and wonders about its name or where’s it going. That’s how I get people to see what I want them to see.