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I didn't know what the story was, but it was a story, sitting right here in the hallway of the News & Record.

Slumped in one chair was a young guy, maybe 25, shellshocked. In the other chair, a woman, 30ish, wiping back a tear, talking on her cell. She spoke gently to someone, a preteen, I guessed: "I bought you some black dress pants you can wear to it."

On the coffee table between them lay a portrait still in the frame: the woman, a different man, two kids.

I looked away, went about my business in the newsroom. When I passed again, they were still there, waiting.

"Can I help you find someone?"

"Nah," the man answered. "Anita's coming. She knows we're here."

Mystery solved. Around the corner, in what we called "the composing room" for page makeup when I was hired to do her job in 1977, obituary writer Anita Slade was on her way. She walked deliberately, collecting her thoughts, the way you do when rehearsing the right thing to say.

"I don't know what the story is," she confided. "They don't know. He died in his sleep. 32. Two kids. Sad."

I see Anita once a week or so. We work in different departments, opposite ends of the building, but we wave. Sometimes she's on a smoke break. I smoked, too, when I had her job. Big, fat Marlboros. And not Lites.

Promoted at 19 from a brief stint as nightside copy girl, this was my first writing job. Everybody kidded the obit writer. First in line, my dad.

"How many did you bury tonight?"

A grand total of 37, in 13 counties.

"Did you spell their names right?"

They didn't call for a correction.

The truth? I liked that job. I sat in the smoky thick of the newsroom. The reporters were funny. The editors, not. My job was critical. I had to show up, or find a sub. No mistakes tolerated. This was the last shot these folks had to get their names in print.

And lest this is starting to sound like I'm writing my own obit, quite the contrary. As evidenced in today's print editions, for which I wrote a long, honking Sunday centerpiece accompanied by (cheers from the copy desk!) no picture of me, I'm not leaving, merely turning a page.

As of today, March 1, City Editor Teresa Prout has promoted me back to the newsroom, where my job will be investigative reporter.

Along with Taft Wireback, whose tobacco reporting reached the semi-final rounds of Pulitzer Prize judging for the News & Record in 1992, and Jason Hardin, N.C. Press Association 2008 feature writing award winner, the enterprise team reports to my longtime boss, Betsi Robinson, the veteran investigative-projects writer who came to Greensboro from the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel newspapers.

All of us are stoked at the chance to rededicate ourselves to watchdog journalism, the core of what we do. But I'd be lying if I said I won't miss this comfy bucket seat, after taking the wheel 12 years ago when my Buick-driving, paperback-writing predecessor, Bill Morris, left for New York City and the novelist's life.

As tall Bill knew, last time I watched him stride up East Market and pelted him with snowballs, there's much to miss about writing a column.

Chiefly, it's you, the reader. It can be the blackest, most frustrating day, and you are always there.

Example? The reader who called the other day - sir, you know exactly who you are - to tell me he was renewing his vows with his wife of 50 years, but first wanted to check into a prenuptial agreement. Why?

"Just in case."

Example? The boarding house over by Fisher Park I wrote about in 2000, just before my son was born. When I returned from maternity leave, the residents had gotten together and sent me a congratulations card. And a man from Wrangler sent me a cowboy decal for my boy's crib.

And of course, who was it that last summer found Mark Hoffmann, the man who put a face and story on the enigmatic problem of chronic homelessness? Not me. It was Mary Kay Auer, and the other 250,000 pairs of eyes moving up and down I-85 and I-95, all News & Record readers. Seek, and ye shall find.

But can it in fact be 12 years, and enough Wednesday and Friday columns alone, as news librarian Diane Lamb calculates, to stretch the entire length of the future planned path of Painter Boulevard?

We did occasionally kid around, but some people couldn't tell we were joking. Usually - surprise, surprise - they were politicians.

Our editor, John Robinson, a man with the patience of a saint, finally gave up trying to explain to our past mayor and our past chairman of the county commissioners that the News & Record reserved the right, under the First Amendment and the Articles of Satire, to print transcripts of public meetings that never took place, except in our collective imagination.

But supposing they had taken place? What if indeed we did have a Mayor's Task Force on Fun? Or the commissioners had squabbled over pizza toppings in a meeting broadcast on Channel 13?

What if ESPN really did broadcast dirt-track minivan racing with matriarch Lynda Petty? Or if there really were such a school as John Dewey Memorial Elementary, where the PTA installed an espresso bar to boost fifth-grade Iowa test scores?

And what if Joe Bag O'Doughnuts is a real guy? Stranger things have happened. To name just one, there was the time that a prank that started out all in fun came true, like a bad liquor dream from a Ray Milland movie.

I'm referring, of course, to "Vote 'Yes' to the River!" campaign. Not allowing ourselves a pity party after the voter smackdown of the major league baseball referendum - we're so sorry, Mr. Stonecipher - we rounded up leftover yard signs, crossed out the word "baseball," and endorsed a paradigm-shifting, world-class plan to revive our decrepit downtown.

There would be river walks! Endangered species! A blues heritage festival! Who cared if we didn't have a river? We would rent a backhoe, dig a hole and build one! Isn't that the spirit that made Greensboro great? Or pretty darned good, anyway?

Then something awful - but in hindsight, totally predictable - happened. Charlotte got wind of it. And they didn't realize that we were "just pickin'," to quote a favorite Southernism. They stole our idea. They built a river, smack dab downtown, with rapids, whitewater rafting, the works.

And we all learned a valuable lesson. We should let Greensboro be Greensboro. And let Charlotte just ... go ahead and be that way.

Easier said than done, I realize, when a lot of readers are counting the weeks until their unemployment benefits run out. But once we've weathered this economic winter together, look at the buds on the trees this spring in our little burg.

The Gateway University Research Park is coming. Biofuels, baby. The Joint School of Nanoscience and Nanoengineering. (I have no idea what that is, but it's impressive.)

It's a good place to be, back to basics, in the city, in the newsroom where I started, doing the job Anita does, that no other news format has really duplicated just yet: an independent daily local newspaper.

Who died yesterday? Who was born? Who got laid off? Who's hiring?

We all wring our hands and say, "imagine a city without a newspaper" when another one bites the dust, as the Rocky Mountain News did on Friday. But reading up for the Tobacco Leaf strike story on the front page of today's print edition, it became clear that cities haven't always had local daily newspapers as they do now.

So. Thanks for coming to my party. Now I'm going to make a wish, blow out my 12 candles and get back to work. Don't be a stranger - I get to keep my old phone number, along with my employee obituary discount.

Mostly, thank you for reading the News & Record, and being a friend.

Confidential to Mr. Prenup:

Our advice is to seal the deal, if she'll still have you. You don't sound like such a bargain yourself, bubby.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com