I have a deal with Mickey, he is our town’s part-time street person. He has a place to live and food to eat – he is George Forss’s stepbrother. He patrols Main Street during the daylight hours. He is my only paid photo subject. Mickey has a face and bearing I love to photograph. His eyes have their own life.

When he was younger, he had a schizophrenic breakdown in New York City and was hospitalized. George, the famous landscape photographer and my friend, brought him up to our town and has cared for him since.

Mickey has many friends in town. He can get food and coffee anytime he wants at the Round House Cafe. As my only paid photo subject, we agreed that I would pay him $2 for every photograph and portrait. Sometimes we talk, sometimes I just take a photo and drive off. Mickey is very friendly and on occasion, is quite chatty.

But we are still working out the smoking thing, and I am uncharacteristically confused about what my position should be, and Hannah Arendt, my favorite moral philosopher, is no help.

Mickey loves to go to Stewart’s, the local convenience store and buy cigarettes and coffee. On occasion, when a portrait session goes long, or it’s a holiday, I have paid Mickey more than two dollars, and I see that when I do, he goes out and buys cigarettes.

Mickey is a grown man, he makes most of his own decisions about life, and I do not believe I have the right to tell him not to smoke, or to make that decision for him. On the other hand, and knowing his personal situation, I know Mickey’s doctors and friends and family very much want him not to smoke.

He and George are both getting older and health matters.

I am clear on one thing:  I don’t really care to be the enabler of his smoking. It is one thing to let  him make his own decisions about smoking, quite another to make it possible for him to smoke.

So we have come down to the $2 or $5 portrait fee. I know Mickey has friends in town, young men who often come by to give him cigarettes. That is not my business. I am not his mother or guardian. I have talked with Mickey about this, and he says it’s okay to pay him $2 or $5, and he knows he shouldn’t smoke.

But he likes it, smoking is a central pleasure in his life.

So that is where we are. Mickey walks down Main Street, he almost always has a cup of coffee and a cigarette. I think I’m often buying the coffee, I think I almost never buy the cigarettes. Perhaps I am fooling myself.