Dreams and journeys
In this issue we feature an article about a man who decided to follow a dream: a distinguished cardiologist who went on a musical journey by financing the CD of a promising but unknown young composer named Omar Akram, who himself acknowledges his music was meant for such journeys:
“I look around and see people who are bored, restless, stagnant and I know they often take secret journeys in their mind as they daydream about other places they could be,” says Akram.
He can be forgiven for assuming all our lives are stagnant because most of us don’t have his background (Akram’s father was an ambassador and his son got to see the world), but I think he’s fundamentally right that we all dream about going to places where we’ve never been, or revisiting places that we once loved. We all have that wanderlust. And since I grew up with Mike Vasilomanolakis, the adventurous cardiologist, I know he was a person always dreaming about his life’s journeys.
We both grew up in Chicago, and on many mornings cold as an icebox we would hitch a ride on my father’s school bus (he was the principal of the Assumption’s Plato School) which would pick up the first kid near our own high school, Lane Tech. Mike and I didn’t do much talking on those morning rides: we just sat across from each other lost in our own teenage high-school boy thoughts (girls, grades, pimples, basketball) and we listened to the bus driver’s radio playing the same old Fifth Dimension song (“Up, Up and Away”) while we sat rooted to the cold seats on that bus and the routine of our everyday lives.
When we got to school, we would camp out from the cold in the drone of the auditorium, where the gray Chicago light spilled in the towering windows with the leather curtains, and hundreds of other boys (Lane was all-boys in those days, which made for an even duller life) would be talking at the same time about girls, while squeezing their pimples, or shouting about their test scores, while hitting each other on the head with their slide rules. Mike would fill me in on last night’s GOYA game, and we might tease each other and our friends, or in that teenage bedlam we might even get serious and talk a little about our dreams.
I always wanted to be a writer, but Mike was searching in those days for his own dreams. There was a girl he had met, his first serious crush, and I gave him some pointers from my vast experience. But he was restless, and so was I, though we were “good” boys, and not likely to break out of our conformity.
Until one morning Mike proved his mettle. We used to wear the same old slacks in those days (probably Sears regulation) while the greasers around us wore gray, or green, or blue shop pants and the hippies wore their fanciful bellbottoms and jeans decorated with peace signs and ripped pockets. One morning I was sitting on the school bus in my Sears regulation, and my jaw dropped when Mike walked on board—wearing white bellbottoms with green pinstripes, as I recall.
He didn’t say a word, I didn’t say a word, he took his seat, and our breath steamed in the cold. But it came a little faster, because Mike had dared to live out a little part of his dreams, and now he had made it possible for both of us to venture on the journeys we had only dreamed about.
Happy Holidays!
Dimitri C. Michalakis
