DREAMS ON

All your life, since you were a wee lad, in bed late at night, after mom and dad had told you more than once to turn off your radio and go to sleep, you lie awake until you hear the din of their movements in the room above die down, and you turn it on again, as low as you can, but not too low you can't hear it. You listen to all types of music, you imagine in your mind the faces as they sing, the players as they play, and in a time before TV came into your life at the age of 11, music is your world. Every chance of solitude you sing at the apex of your breathing, use a tennis racquet or a broom as a guitar, pick up a couple of pencils as drumsticks and flail away, sing into your fist as though it held a microphone. You share these moments with your cousin, the one-day-older-than-you cousin who has a TV yet still prefers introducing you to Led Zeppelin and Rush in the late 70's from The Loop 98 rock radio out of Chicago, the same cousin with whom you formed an air band and instead of playing cops and robbers you played the Monkees in the front living room of a quaint Cicero neighborhood home.

Over the years your love of music only grew, your hunger to play and sing in a band more acute, and every opportunity presenting itself you took on, even when you knew it was for naught. Why? Because you can sing, you have talent and you know it. You can't read a lick of music but can play any instrument by ear, you can learn a song after hearing it one time through. You've imagined yourself on stage, it's been your grandest dream, your fondest hope, your greatest pain of regret.

But the years have passed you by, the dream is all but a flashpan memory, and the pain a stymied dull ache ever pulsing in the deepest caverns.

Tonight, you walked into a room with your two brothers and three other men who are also brothers, all around the same age, same temperments, same humorous sense, same love for music, same lifetime dream for the stage, for the music, for the feeling of playing live, the pulse of the beat you're producing, the melody of the vocal you're singing, the strum of the strings as fingers dance across the frets.

Six men. Two families. Same dream.

There were no tennis racquets, no pencils, no empty fists. Tonight there were three guitars strapped over shoulders, one bass thumping out the deep end, one drumset keeping rhythm by human hands, one voice singing out the words to songs you've waited to play since you were born.

Six men. Two families. Same dream. One God.

Dreams can come true.

Crush