My team

My team.

     "Great research from you and your team," began a reader's email, referring to my column "Don't be like Texas' Murph."

    Which brought a smile ... a weary, knowing smile. 

     "My team," I said aloud, admiring the phrase like a Christmas tree ornament. For a moment they flashed before me, my team: the freshly-scrubbed, efficient assistant. "Here are those clips you asked for, boss!" The bookish researcher, hurrying up from the stacks. "Look at this, chief!" My legman, Scoop, simmering with the same ambition I had as a young man, unfurling his long legs, resting his heels against the window ledge at the end of a long day, while we share a convivial beverage and brainstorm about my next column. 
     Sigh. I've never risen, if that is the proper term, to the sort of columnist who had assistants or legmen, staffers who could make calls and get coffee and lend an air of significance to the operation. No Stella Foster for me. Which, I hasten to add, is why I'm still here. Legmen went along with big salaries and personal contracts, which eventually end. Allowing, thanks to the seismic changes in the industry and culture, the big salaried columnist and his fat contract and his legman to be shown the gate by always parsimonious bosses.  Jeff Zaslow was a fabulous, hard-working advice columnist with a secretary and a contract, and the last time it came up for renewal his bosses realized they could syndicate a spunky Canadian lady for a few hundred bucks a week. 

     I've always been a standard union drudge, protected by the standard union contract, albeit with a few extra incentives added when I seemed set to stray off reservation. Which isn't flashy, but better for racking up the years and miles; a 1952 Ford pick-up v. a Ferrari.  My low status is my lance, my obscurity, my shield.

     "Thanks." I wrote back. "'My team'? 😁 Oh, I know who you mean."

     I attached the above photo.

     Though both immigration columns had another helping hand. Someone who doesn't get nearly  enough credit and should be mentioned: my wife. She looked up from the paper, noting an article about a scarcity of bus drivers, and said we should just train the immigrants to drive buses, send their children to the emptied out Chicago public schools and house them in the abandoned offices downtown. None of which ended up in either column. But was the nudge that set the whole train of thought rolling down the track. 

     Or as I said recently to a neighbor who accused me of being smart:

     "I'm not smart. I'm just married to a smart woman." 

     She's all the team I need.