Smiling Eyes

The Gulf County School District is going to miss her.

Her daughter is going to notice her absence every day.

And I will miss that smile that warmed the coldest and droopiest day, those eyes that invited you in for a soothing smidge of conversation.

Marlene Sewell retired from the school district last week, calling it quits after more than 30 years at Port St. Joe High School and the district office, her location over much of that time dependent on her daughter's.

That daughter, Mary Lou Cumbie, is known to most in this county for her lilting singing voice and the treats she and her mother, Ms. Sewell, concocted in their warm kitchens that smelled like holidays every time I was honored to pull up a chair and set a spell.

Ms. Sewell and her daughter spent almost 20 years together at the high school, taking care of the front office and dealing with generation after generation of students, many of them members of the same family tree.

When her daughter took the job of administrative assistant to Superintendent of Schools Tim Wilder, separating the two for the first time in Ms. Cumbie's career, it only figured that Ms. Sewell would soon follow.

And so she did when the front desk at the district office opened up and so it was that every time I set foot in the district offices, there was that kind face, the glint in the eye, always welcoming, beckoning for a word about an article or about family or about, well, life.

Initially I came to know Ms. Sewell over the phone, a new guy in town seeking information at the high school and constantly finding a soul on the other end willing to point me in the right direction and do so with a kind word and boundless grace.

When I met her face-to-face in the high school office, she made me feel like she'd known me all her life, wondered after my family and how she might be able to assist that day.

If that smile was ever erased from that sunny face, I never was privy to it.

But it was never the painted-on sort that so many of us encounter throughout each day, that we ourselves often use to fool the world.

Hers is the genuine creasing of the face that comes from the soul, from some gene inside that never dims.

And never tires of humanity, the kind of gene that ignites a drive to assist others before she will ever stand in line for help herself.

She possesses this unerring knack for making you feel better about yourself and the world around you but making you feel like part of the family, her family, which anybody who knows Ms. Sewell can attest, extends well beyond blood lines.

You were invited, no cards or gifts necessary.

I was privileged to be on hand to observe the creation of that famous 18-layer chocolate-coated cake that required an insulin shot just to look.

The paper was invited in to talk with her husband, Paul, about his 50 years of attending the Florida High School Athletics Association basketball tournament, for which the FHSAA honored him and a streak he extended again this year.

When the Sewell/Cumbie clan was caroling around Christmas, there was an invite.

When there was illness in our family, there were the brownies - on the house, not a dime to be accepted.

In simple terms, the School District could not have dreamed up a better ambassador to be sitting at the first desk encountered by visitors to its central offices.

Maybe those visitors might not have found a wall chart of school grades or results from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, but they received a real-life example as to the way people are treated in the district, should be treated in the community as a whole.

Marlene Sewell is just a person, a humble human being. She is just good people, no more no less than that.

And in that lies her deep and abiding beauty, her distinct humanity, a sort of magic of purpose and spirit, as if put on this Earth for the benefit of making other's days brighter.

There is no better example of the Golden Rule that I've encountered as an adult and here is hope that there is still a small slice of her presence still left for me in the years to come.

But she's earned her chance to be at home, to spend more time with her husband, to kick back and relax a bit, provided - and this is written selfishly - the treats don't stop emerging from her bang-up kitchen.

The School District is losing a shining light. Her daughter is losing her work companion.

I will be missing a friend and I don't feel I have a surplus of those to lose.

So the last thing this space represents is goodbye, Ms. Sewell.

This space is to just say thanks and my thoughts and prayers are with you.

More simply, I don't have the words.