When I was 24 (correction: actually I was 20. I was 24 when I moved to New York) I left the baby photography studio I worked for as a typist and got a job in the Loop, a step up for me. I was hired as a secretary, also a first, to a convention rep for the Chicago Convention Bureau. The work was more interesting and I felt I was working in an upscale world since the correspondence I dealt with was addressed to civic leaders and the like.

The Bureau was in a wonderful old Building, part of the Bismarck Hotel block on La Salle and Randolph. Looking south on La Salle Street, you could see the financial center with the big clock, blocking off the street at that end. We would take our morning coffee breaks in one of the hotel’s restaurants, entering through a connecting door in the lobby. Sometimes I would order lingonberry pancakes, one of their specialties, in a time when the weight gain fairy didn’t know where I lived.

There was another bar/restaurant off the lobby and sometimes, in the afternoon, I would go there for coffee as would others from my office. There were many lawyers in the building who frequented this charming little café. Eventually, they began to chat with me and often invited me to sit with them, to the consternation (and I am sure envy) of some of the young women I worked with who had shunned me as not being of their world of suburbia and silver patterns. I had grown up in the inner city and had not yet shucked off all the street-wise affect in order to fit in. My answer to their rejection was to count myself lucky and I made foxier friends.

I remember when I was reading “From Here to Eternity”, the office manager, a woman whose husband, a professor at a nearby college, was known as a notorious womanizer, said to me in a genteel tone, that she thought the book was not realistic since “no one talks like that” and she was referring to the four-letter words. “Sure they do,” I said, having a bit more experience with this side of things. I suspect her ladylike refusal to admit to any other reality was one of the reasons her husband strayed. My response, in any case, did not endear me to her.

Meanwhile, one of the lawyers I sat with at coffee break, was so whimsical and charming, that I developed a crush on him. He was married. Our flirtation did not go anywhere but last night (50 years later) I dreamed about him. He had been a remarkable personality, quirky and unusual, quite unlike anyone I've known before or since. His name was Mark. He wasn’t too tall, but had broad shoulders and a leonine face and a commanding presence.

Once I asked him, having heard that he had supported Henry Wallace, (a man tainted with Communist accusations) if he was a Communist. I said this in all naïveté since I was abysmally ignorant of most political issues. Mark was giving me a lift to my flat (where I lived with my parents). He pulled over to the curb, stopped the car, and laughed for 5 minutes. “Oh, do not worry, little one, he answered, through tears, “I’ll spare you when I’m commissar.”

Some time later I made plans to move to New York to develop a life away from the family, since having one while living at home was very constricting. I kept in touch with Mark, occasionally phoning him at his office. Jay had traveled with me to Chicago to meet my parents and I had introduced them.

One day I got a strange voice and learned that Mark had traveled to the Mayo Clinic for open-heart surgery, had developed complications and had not survived. He was, perhaps about 41 at that time. My dear friend, gone. In some ways I have never gotten over that. And once every few years, I dream about him.

xx, Teal