Life with Gracie: I spend most of my day with people I don’t know

I never really thought about how sad that is that we sometimes know so little about the people with whom we work, whom we see for at least eight hours of nearly every day of the week or considered what I might have been missing.

Then Carolyn Warmbold retired last week and though I know someone will soon take her place, a little piece of me will go with her if for no other reason than she was the one who launched this column at 5 a.m. every Tuesday and Thursday.

And so as I’d done before, I gave in the office collection plate for her parting gift and signed the card when it came around concealed in a manila folder. I bade her farewell, writing that I’d miss her, and then showed up for the farewell celebration.

The room filled to capacity with both current and former AJCers and I listened intently as my colleagues beckoned memories of the time they’d shared with her, recalled how much she’d inspired them and, in one instance, how her firing had made him better.

“I deserved it,” he admitted before locking her in a bear hug.

You knew they were all heartfelt. Tears fell. Voices cracked with emotion.

And then Carolyn spoke, no, she quickly read from four pages of notes she’d written beforehand.

“I didn’t want to forget anything,” she’d say to me later, her face red with emotion.

I felt blessed she didn’t.

She told us she was a kid when she decided she was going to be like Lois Lane, a woman with a career instead of a housewife.

Carolyn never deviated from that goal, graduating 50 years ago from the Missouri school of journalism and then marrying a few months later her version of Clark Kent, a guy named Ted Warmbold.

I wasn’t surprised to learn Ted Warmbold’s career took off and she ended up kinda just tagging along. Men tend to fare better in our business.

Being the wife of an editor and unable to overcome nepotism rules, Carolyn eventually turned to academia.

She was working on her Ph.D. dissertation, the politics of absence in the media, when to her surprise Ted suddenly died of AIDS.

“It turned out that, like Lois Lane, I wasn’t clear on the true identity of my Clark Kent,” she told us. “Ted was gay.”

By the time I arrived at the AJC in the summer of 2000, Carolyn had already put in five years. She was the Page 1 editor and I was a features writer, covering health care issues.

One of the first big stories I wrote, ironically, was about men on the down low, which garnered an award for feature writing from the Atlanta Association of Black Journalists.

Listening to Carolyn weave her personal life with the professional, it was clear to me what a superb storyteller she must have been.

When she signed off, using the -30-, newspaper lingo for the end, the applause went on for what seemed like forever.

I soon left the room but her words seemed to glom onto me and I couldn't shake feeling I had somehow missed something, that we all had.

I remembered a story a guest speaker at my church told recently about dining out with her mother.

“Margaret, why is everybody looking down?” her mother had asked.

Margaret looked around and observed everyone looking at their cellphones.

Suddenly I felt like I’d been looking at my cellphone for the past 16 years, never really talking to Carolyn to get to know her, just sort of passing by, focused on the next day’s story.

As a reporter, it’s hard to get around that. You meet one deadline only to face another and another.

But I can promise you, I will never look at deadlines, my cellphone, Facebook or any other social media the same ever again.

They’re all distractions from what really matters in our lives — the people God shares with us but whom we never take the time to get to know.