The day after his defeat in a newly created district where few knew his name, state lawmaker Jim Campbell went to bed.

The chest cold he developed in the last days of the campaign allowed the graying 55-year-old social worker from Baltimore to avoid thinking about his changed place in the world for at least a week.

As disappointed as he was by the election result, deep down he felt liberated. He had attended community meetings in his district almost every night for 24 years, and it was a relief to think he'd have his evenings to himself.

"I can do what I want to do when I want to," he thought.

What he would do next, he hadn't a clue.

Losing his seat in the House of Delegates wasn't the only change Campbell faced. Longer than he has been a lawmaker, he had been a social worker. That job, too, ended abruptly this year when the company he worked for 30 hours a week was sold. Worse, his mother was diagnosed with cancer. Tuesdays now were reserved for taking her to chemotherapy.

There was no denying the funk that enveloped Campbell in the first weeks of being a lame duck. Many of his colleagues hoped to avoid the pain by flying to the Caribbean, returning to work at their real jobs full time or asking for a recount.

But Campbell, as soon as he recovered from his cold, started showing up at nightly meetings again. This was what he loved, and he decided it was good for him to stay active and focused. And in his office near the Rotunda shopping center, he worked ever more diligently to resolve outstanding problems.

There was the new, smaller high school he helped get in the old 42nd District, the one he hoped would be more attractive to dropouts on street corners in Hampden than the now closed Northern High School had been. A lower-than-expected ninth-grade enrollment worried him, though. After sitting through another meeting on the school, he wrote a last letter of support to the superintendent.

The Roosevelt Park recreation center renovation still needed approval from city officials or the $200,000 in state bond money Campbell had won for it would expire; he wanted to secure the city's commitment.

The minibus he promised new constituents in Towson, in a bid to attract votes, needed a push. He wanted to model it after the one he got for Hampden.

Constituents still called his office with complaints: Potholes. Frozen water pipes. Campbell came in on a Saturday to help with that one. Most of the problems he handled were more appropriately directed to city council members, not state lawmakers. But Campbell solved them anyway. He invited people to call him; on the 8-by-11 "where to call for help" sheet he handed out, he included his home number.

As usual the first week of December, he convinced city officials to knock off a few hundred dollars from the Hampden Christmas parade permit fee by questioning estimates for police and sanitation. Over the years, parade organizers estimated he'd saved the volunteer group $20,000.

For 20 years Campbell had walked in the parade, zigzagging from curb to curb, greeting people in the neighborhood where he got his start, the only politician who didn't ride in a car. Now he had to decide whether to be in the parade at all. The chairman, Tom Kerr, was pestering him to march as usual.

Campbell was torn. What good would it do?

At a meeting of the Hampden Community Association, he listened to concerns about how a new townhouse development for Clipper Mill Road might affect traffic. There were 40 community groups whose meetings he always attended. Typically he sat in the back and took notes. People would turn around and say "Jim, What do we do, who do we call?" At the next meeting, he would return with the answer or, sometimes, the tools, like a new state loan for small businesses to help revive 36th Street. Cafe Hon was one of the first businesses to win one.

Now when Campbell appeared at meetings or flea markets, Christmas bazaars and Hanukkah festivals, people said things like, "Sorry for your loss." They meant well, he knew, but he was taken aback. He couldn't imagine the death of Jim Campbell, public servant.

Things were definitely not the same. The week he was sick, Campbell misplaced his phone book. He didn't remember numbers as well as he thought he should.

But the more work he did in the community, the better he felt.

Elected officials with the high profile of a Cas Taylor, the Speaker of the Maryland House, might be courted for jobs after their defeat. But at Jim Campbell's level, nobody was lining up with offers. He had never claimed credit for things, to the dismay of his supporters, never hung the awards he won in his office or sat for photos with famous people, and now he had to seek out his own job. He put it off until after Thanksgiving. He had sent out resumes once before, and the response had not been good.

To make matters worse, he lost his keys.

Mary Pat Clarke, his former mentor and for eight years the Baltimore City Council president, advised him to pray to St. Gregory. It worked.

On the phone with Clarke, hearing her grandchildren in the background, Campbell was transported back to 1970, when the noisy kids on the phone were Clarke's own. It was under Clarke's tutelage 32 years ago that he had started the Hampden Community Council, the neighborhood association, to do something about the decrepit elementary school.

He lived in Hampden then, before there was a mayor's Christmas parade or local merchants who rode on floats and dressed up as Baltimore Hons. Campbell got a new elementary school built. Then he worked on the revival of 36th Street. He stayed in office long enough to see the neighborhood's second, and more secure, revival.

Briefly last summer, after a court divided the patch of earth he represented for 24 years into four districts, forcing him to choose among them, Campbell wondered whether it was time to do something else.

Winning in the new district was a long shot; only one-third of the people knew anything about him, and the district didn't include Hampden. It took him until the end of July to move from his city townhouse to an apartment in his new district in Towson. If he didn't try, he thought, he'd always wonder.

He was glad he did. The campaign made him realize how much of the stuff he did was in his blood. It also showed him what he was missing.

One day, while campaigning door-to-door in Roland Park, he came upon two men firing up a charcoal grill in the back yard. He listened as they debated what to barbecue for dinner.

Here was real life, he realized.

He never ate dinner at dinner time.

What would it be like?

Three times he recounted the scene to Clarke. He was obsessed by it, not because he was preparing himself for what might happen if he lost, but maybe, he thought, because of what he wanted to have happen.

The ability to handle change was something Campbell envied in other people. Stories of how people survived challenges, how they dug deep to find inner resources, had always impressed him.

Jimmy Carter, for instance, took on projects after leaving the White House that earned him more recognition than before. Campbell found himself reading Carter's books. Someone gave him an early Christmas present, a book on Sandy Koufax, the baseball pitcher who went from stardom to oblivion when arthritis struck, and Campbell read that, too.

He didn't dwell on his loss. "It doesn't pay to look back," he said. He picked up his New York Times Book Reviews where he left off, November 2001. He worked out daily - he called it his therapy. And he went to community meetings.

As usual on the eve of the parade, he attended the annual dinner for its organizers at a church on Falls Road. He hadn't worked as hard this year because of his campaign, and he felt bad. But it didn't matter. He got an award and a standing ovation when he accepted it.

"Jim always rises up above the rest of us," explained Kerr, the parade chair for 30 years. "A lesser man or woman would have dropped everything the day they lost. He has been the perfect elected official. Big guy or little guy, he makes a phone call. It doesn't matter if it is $2 million or a $40 water bill.

"If you opened up a [civics] book in school to see how politics is supposed to go, you would swear he wrote it."

The standing ovation felt good.

So did the lunch invitations that had come in since his defeat: from, among others, state Education Commissioner Nancy Grasmick, Art Abramson of the Baltimore Jewish Council and Sheila Hixson, the Montgomery County delegate who chaired Ways and Means, the committee on which Campbell served five years, heading the subcommittee on education.

He had assumed they would forget all about him.

And although the people in Hampden had been appreciative, he couldn't bring himself to march behind a sign bearing the name of a has-been.

The next afternoon, he did something he had never done before: He walked the parade route backward before it started, greeting constituents as they staked out viewing spots.

At the gathering point, he hitched a ride with Kerr in a car marked "parade chair" - one last anonymous sweep down the parade route in the community that first elected him. At the reviewing stand, he got out of the car and disappeared into the crowd to find his family.

He didn't want people to think he was hibernating, though. That was one reason he attended the inaugural of Jim Smith, the new Baltimore County executive, the next week; he hadn't seen many of the people who had helped him since his defeat.

There he spotted Donna Spicer, a community activist he met while campaigning, and asked when her new countywide education group would meet. Spicer realized early on Campbell knew a lot about education, and when she checked with her counterparts in the neighborhoods Campbell represented, she learned of his efforts on behalf of the Thornton Commission spending plan for schools and special education. The day after his defeat, she invited Campbell to join the new group. He accepted.

By the third week in December, calls to Campbell's office tapered off. The word was getting out. There were more lunches with people he ran into on the street, more awards from community groups, and a tour of Finnerty's soon-to-open tea shop.

To his surprise, he landed two job interviews, including one at the Children's Defense Fund. His $30,000 state house salary and health insurance would last a few more weeks.

Movers took away his desk and chair, but Campbell went to his office and answered his phone. His community work continued.

On a Tuesday one week before Christmas, wearing a sport coat and tie, his hair falling on his collar, he stopped by Robert Poole High School to meet the new principal. He hadn't received a response from the schools chief to his letter, but he left the meeting feeling confident things were on the right track.

A visit to the rec center, its roof leaking again, confirmed how much the bond money was needed; a letter from city hall called it a done deal. (Discussions with transportation officials about the Towson bus were less fruitful; there would be no money this year. )

As he has for the past three years, he swung by Roland Park Elementary School to read to a special education class of fifth-graders. Afterward he gave out General Assembly pins and updated them on the ice cream bill they'd discussed the previous year: It passed. Now, it's legal to eat ice cream cones outside the store where they're bought.

Then came the hard part, telling the children that he had lost his seat and wouldn't return to Annapolis on Wednesday when the session starts.

"Sometimes in life," he began, "you win by losing.

"Even though I didn't win re-election, maybe I can do other things that may help you and others more," he said. "That's what I'm doing now, figuring out what I want."

On his way out, he said goodbye to Mariale Hardiman, the inspiration for a law he wrote to start a principal mentoring program. He listened to her worry aloud about budget cuts, knowing he wouldn't be there to help.

He thought of himself as a public servant, not a politician. The honor people did him by asking him to represent them was something he felt but never let dominate. "That's why I like to go to community meetings," he said, "because when you are around people, you remain down to earth. It doesn't go to your head."

His visits that morning, to meet the new high school principal, to the rec center, where he was greeted by city workers, made him realize he was going to miss the trappings of office. He couldn't walk in some place anymore and expect to be greeted by the person in charge.

"I can't get things done," he said.

But defeat also made him realize that what he wants to do next is what he's done all these 24 years: help people.