A life in
song & story.

My name is Todd Mayson, and this is Audio Story Time—a place where songs, memories, and the life behind them meet.

There are things we own because they’re useful.

A chair gives us somewhere to sit.

A watch tells us the time.

A guitar gives us six strings, some wood, and a place to put our hands.

But every now and then, an ordinary object becomes something more.

It becomes connected to certain rooms.

Certain people.

Certain versions of ourselves.

And after enough years, we can pick it up and feel the distance between who we were and who we’ve become.

Not because the object remembers.

But because we do.

Today’s story is about a guitar, the memories we attach to the things we love, and a song called “Martin and the Memories.”

A guitar is built to make sound.

That’s its practical purpose.

Wood vibrates. Strings move. Air carries what happens next.

But anyone who has lived with an instrument for a while knows that its practical purpose isn’t the whole story.

A guitar becomes familiar in ways that are difficult to explain to somebody who doesn’t play.

Your hands learn where to go before your mind has decided.

You recognize the tension of the strings.

The shape of the neck.

The place where your arm rests against the body.

You know which notes open easily and which ones need a little more attention.

After enough time, you stop approaching the instrument as a separate object.

You meet it more like an old conversation.

That’s what I was reaching for when I wrote “Martin and the Memories.”

The song isn’t simply about a brand of guitar.

It’s about what happens when music, memory, and identity become attached to something we can hold.

A guitar can’t remember the rooms where it was played.

It doesn’t know who was listening.

It doesn’t know which song was played at a wedding, which one was played after a funeral, or which chord was struck by somebody trying to make it through another night.

But the person holding it knows.

The body knows.

The hands know.

Sometimes the heart knows before the mind is ready to admit it.

There have been many seasons in my life when music gave me a way to remain connected to myself.

There were times when I didn’t understand what I was feeling.

Times when I couldn’t explain why I was restless, frightened, angry, or unable to stay in places where part of me desperately wanted to belong.

There were years when I understood myself mostly through the consequences of my decisions.

But a guitar never asked me to explain myself before I touched it.

It didn’t need a diagnosis.

It didn’t need a defense.

It simply responded to what my hands gave it.

Sometimes what came out was joy.

Sometimes grief.

Sometimes loneliness.

Sometimes something I wouldn’t understand until years later.

That doesn’t mean music magically healed everything.

I want to be careful about that.

We sometimes tell stories about art as though the right song can repair every wound.

It can’t.

A guitar can’t make a decision for us.

It can’t undo harm.

It can’t replace treatment, accountability, faith, community, or the difficult work of learning how to live differently.

But music can give what’s happening inside us somewhere to go.

And sometimes that’s where healing begins—not with everything being fixed, but with something finally being expressed.

I’ve spent more than thirty-five years playing music.

That’s long enough for a guitar to collect associations that have nothing to do with its monetary value.

A certain chord can return me to a room I haven’t thought about in years.

A progression can bring back the feeling of a person standing beside me.

A worn song can remind me not only of where I played it, but of who I believed I was when I did.

Memory works that way.

It doesn’t always return as a complete story.

Sometimes it arrives as a sound.

A smell.

The feel of wood beneath your arm.

A note ringing longer than you expected.

And suddenly, the past isn’t past in the way you thought it was.

It’s standing in the room with you.

That can be beautiful.

It can also be complicated.

Not every memory attached to music is happy.

Some songs carry people who are no longer here.

Some carry relationships that didn’t survive.

Some return us to versions of ourselves we would rather forget.

A guitar may remind us of the night everything felt possible.

It may also remind us of the morning after everything fell apart.

The same instrument can carry celebration and grief without resolving the contradiction.

Maybe that’s part of what makes music truthful.

It doesn’t always force our lives into a single meaning.

A major chord can contain sorrow.

A sad song can make us feel less alone.

Something associated with loss can eventually become part of our gratitude.

The memories don’t disappear.

Our relationship to them changes.

That distinction matters to me.

Healing isn’t forgetting.

It isn’t pretending the painful parts no longer belong to us.

And it isn’t returning to the past as though we could finally make everything happen differently.

Healing may be learning how to remember without being controlled by the memory.

It may be holding what happened with enough mercy that it no longer has to hide—or rule the room.

When I pick up a guitar now, I don’t become the boy I once was.

I don’t become the teenager who kept running.

I don’t become the young man trying to find a place after prison.

I don’t become every musician I’ve been in every band, bar, church, studio, and living room.

But none of those people disappear either.

They’re part of the hands I have now.

The boy who first reached toward a guitar is still present.

The teenager who needed somewhere to put his feelings is still present.

The man who learned to survive is still present.

And so is the man who is learning that survival and living aren’t the same thing.

When I play today, all of those lives meet in the same pair of hands.

Maybe that’s what becoming whole looks like.

Not erasing earlier versions of ourselves.

Not allowing the worst version to become the only one.

But bringing the scattered pieces into a life that has enough room to hold them.

There’s a temptation to romanticize the past.

Musicians are especially good at it.

We remember the old rooms as warmer than they were.

The crowds as larger.

The music as better.

We remember the people we miss at their best and ourselves as more certain than we probably were.

Nostalgia can soften the edges of memory.

Sometimes that’s merciful.

Sometimes it keeps us from telling the truth.

I don’t want “Martin and the Memories” to suggest that everything behind us was better.

It wasn’t.

I don’t want to return to every room where I once played.

I don’t want to repeat every choice that became part of a song.

And I’m grateful that I’m not the same person I was when some of those memories were made.

The value of remembering isn’t that the past was perfect.

It’s that the past was real.

It shaped us.

It gave us wounds, yes.

But it also gave us language, endurance, music, people, and moments of grace we may not have recognized when they arrived.

The task isn’t to live backward.

It’s to receive what the past can honestly give us without surrendering the life that is still ahead.

My faith has given me another way to think about ordinary things carrying meaning.

In the sacramental life of the Church, common elements become places of encounter.

Water is still water.

Bread is still bread.

Wine is still wine.

But they are not treated as meaningless.

They become part of a story larger than themselves.

They help us remember who we are and whose we are.

I’m not saying a guitar is a sacrament.

But the sacramental imagination has taught me to pay attention.

It has taught me that ordinary things can bear extraordinary meaning without ceasing to be ordinary.

Wood can still be wood and carry a lifetime of songs.

A meal can still be a meal and become a place of reconciliation.

A room can still be a room and become somewhere we finally feel safe.

A guitar can still be a guitar and help somebody hear a part of himself that had gone quiet.

Faith, at its healthiest, doesn’t pull me away from the tangible world.

It teaches me to notice it.

To receive it.

To ask what grace may already be doing through the people, sounds, rituals, and ordinary objects around me.

Maybe that’s why instruments matter so much to musicians.

They remind us that creativity is physical.

A song may begin somewhere we can’t see, but eventually breath has to move.

A hand has to touch a string.

Wood has to vibrate.

The unseen becomes audible through something real.

That’s true of healing too.

We may carry hope inside us, but eventually hope has to take form.

It becomes a phone call.

An apology.

A boundary.

A return.

A meal shared with someone.

A place in a community.

A decision to remain when the old instinct says to run.

Grace becomes visible through ordinary acts.

And sometimes it becomes audible through an old guitar.

“Martin and the Memories” is ultimately not about remaining in the past.

It’s about recognizing that the road behind us has become part of the person standing here now.

Some memories still hurt.

Some make me laugh.

Some arrive through a song before I know they’re coming.

I don’t have to choose between honoring those memories and continuing to become.

I can do both.

I can be grateful for the boy who found music.

I can have compassion for the young man who didn’t yet understand himself.

I can take responsibility for the places where my pain became pain for somebody else.

I can mourn what was lost.

And I can still believe that my life is more than a collection of things that happened to me.

The memories belong to me.

But they don’t own me.

They become part of the music.

And then the music moves forward.

Maybe you have something like that.

It may not be a guitar.

It might be a photograph.

A recipe written in somebody’s handwriting.

A piece of furniture.

A prayer book with worn pages.

A shirt you can’t bring yourself to give away.

Something ordinary that holds a connection to a person, a place, or an earlier version of you.

The object can’t return what was lost.

But perhaps it can remind you that love existed.

That you survived.

That the person you were has not been erased, even as you continue becoming someone new.

The things we keep don’t remember us.

But sometimes they help us remember ourselves.

And sometimes remembering ourselves is how we find the courage to keep moving forward.

I’m Todd Mayson, and this has been Audio Story Time.

You can hear “Martin and the Memories” and learn more about the music and my memoir, The Altar of My Mind, at toddmayson.com.

Thank you for listening.

My name is Todd Mayson, and this is Audio Story Time - A place where songs, memories, and the life behind them meet.

There are some words we use so often that we stop noticing what they leave out.

Homeless. Addict. Troubled. Failure.

Sometimes a word can tell us something true about a person’s circumstances and still tell us almost nothing about the person.

Today’s story is about my little brother, Barry Jr. And it’s about a song called “Cardboard Crown.”

Barry knew homelessness. That’s true. But it isn’t the first truth about him.

Before Barry was an unsheltered man, he was my little brother. He was somebody’s son. He was part of a family. He had a name long before anybody had a category for him.

I think that matters, because once we place a person inside a category, it can become easy to believe we understand them. We don’t.

We may understand something about their circumstances. We may recognize behavior. We may even understand some of the choices that helped bring them to where they are. But we don’t know the whole person.

And if we aren’t careful, the label becomes a stopping place. It gives us permission to stop being curious. It lets us see a problem without having to feel a name.

There’s a passage in my memoir, The Altar of My Mind, where I try to explain what writing “Cardboard Crown” meant to me.

Barry Jr. had known homelessness. He had known the kind of life people too easily look past. The kind of suffering that becomes invisible because people learn to step around it.

But he was not invisible to me. He was my little brother. He was someone’s son. He was a child of God.

And when I wrote Cardboard Crown, I was not trying to turn his life into a symbol. I was trying to give dignity to someone the world might have missed. I was trying to say that his life mattered beyond the circumstances people could see.

There’s a line in that passage I keep returning to: The kind of suffering that becomes invisible because people learn to step around it.

We step around people physically. We do it with our eyes. We do it in conversation. And sometimes we do it in the stories we tell ourselves.

We tell ourselves that somebody made bad decisions. Maybe they did. We tell ourselves that we can’t help everyone. That’s true. We tell ourselves that the situation is complicated. It almost certainly is.

But every one of those statements can be true, and the person in front of us can still be worthy of dignity.

Compassion doesn’t require us to deny complexity. It requires us to refuse the idea that complexity cancels dignity.

When I wrote “Cardboard Crown,” I found myself writing from the distance between what the world sees and what love remembers.

You see a problem
I feel a name
You see my blanket
I feel the rain
You see a failure
I feel a face
I had a front door
I had a place

Those words still get to me. Because a blanket may be what you see today. But before the blanket, there may have been a bedroom. Before the sidewalk, there may have been a kitchen table. Before the face became somebody you learned not to look at, it was the face somebody kissed goodnight.

That doesn’t erase responsibility. It doesn’t pretend that every relationship is safe, that every need can be met by one person, or that love always knows how to repair what has been broken. I know better than that.

There are wounds we can’t fix. There are decisions we can’t make for somebody else. There are times when healthy boundaries are necessary. But a boundary doesn’t have to become contempt. And helplessness doesn’t have to become indifference.

I couldn’t rewrite every part of Barry’s life. I couldn’t protect him from everything that happened. I couldn’t love him into a different ending.

But I could remember him whole. I could say his name. I could write a song that refused to let the hardest part of his life become the only thing people knew about him.

Grief has taught me something about attention. When you love somebody, you notice what the world misses.

The world sees homelessness. Love remembers a name. The world sees a failure. Love remembers a face. The world sees the cold ground. Love remembers that there was once a child there—and that, in some way, there still is.

I don’t mean that sentimentally. Seeing somebody’s humanity doesn’t mean turning them into an innocent character in a story we’ve written for ourselves. People are complicated. Barry was complicated. I’m complicated. All of us are.

Human dignity isn’t a prize we receive after somebody has decided we’re uncomplicated enough to deserve it. It belongs to us before the judgment begins.

This is where my faith has changed the way I understand the story.

I was raised in a fundamentalist evangelical environment where faith could sometimes feel centered on deciding who was right, who was wrong, who was in, and who was out.

But the faith I’m learning to live now keeps bringing me back to a different question: How am I treating the person in front of me?

Jesus had a way of seeing people after everybody else had finished naming them. The poor. The sick. The sinner. The outsider.

He didn’t pretend their lives weren’t complicated. He simply refused to let the category become the whole person.

That’s the kind of faith I want. Not a faith that makes me better at sorting people. A faith that makes me harder to teach contempt. A faith that keeps asking me to look again.

This is my cardboard crown
Duct-taped throne on the cold hard ground
People step wide like I’m something to dodge
But I’m still here
I’m still here

I’m still here. There’s a declaration inside those words.

You may not see me, but I’m still here. You may have reduced me to what happened to me, but I’m still here. You may think my circumstances have erased my worth, but I’m still here.

Barry was my brother before he was anybody’s cautionary tale, charitable cause, or uncomfortable encounter. He was loved. He mattered. He still matters.

“Cardboard Crown” began with my grief for him, but the song reaches beyond the two of us.

It belongs to every person whose name has been replaced by a condition. Every person we’ve described before we’ve taken the time to know. Every person the rest of us have learned to step around.

I can’t solve homelessness in the time it takes to tell a story. But maybe a story can interrupt the way we see.

Maybe the next time we encounter someone whose life is visible in all the ways ours is protected from being visible, we can resist the urge to reduce them.

Maybe we can look again. Maybe we can remember there was a front door. Maybe we can ask a name.

And maybe the Kingdom of God becomes visible here and now in moments just like that—not only in what we say we believe, but in whether the person in front of us is treated as someone who bears the image of God.

Because mercy isn’t pretending that life is simple. Mercy is refusing to let another person’s hardest chapter become their entire name.

My brother’s name was Barry. And he was still here.

I’m Todd Mayson, and this has been Audio Story Time.

You can hear “Cardboard Crown” and learn more about the music and my memoir, The Altar of My Mind, at toddmayson.com.

Thank you for listening.

I’m Todd Mayson, and this is Audio Story Time - a place where songs, memories, and the life behind them meet.

This first episode is called I’m Not Sick, But I’m Not Fine.

There’s a difference between knowing somebody’s story and understanding what that story has taught them.

My story includes childhood trauma, running away, addiction, prison, music, faith, and eventually finding a language for things I’d carried most of my life.

But I don’t want to tell these stories simply because difficult things happened to me.

I want to understand what they can teach us about the way we see one another.

Because when somebody is struggling, we usually see the behavior first.

We see what they did.

We see the disruption.

We see the mistake.

We may not see what the behavior is carrying.

Years ago, before I had a diagnosis or understood much about trauma, I wrote a song called “Festival of Time.”

I knew the words meant something.

I just didn’t understand how much they knew about me.

There’s a passage in my memoir, The Altar of My Mind, that begins with two lines from that song.

I’d like to read it to you.

Memoir excerpt

There is a line in Festival of Time that may describe my teenage years better than anything I could have said back then.

In this festival of time
I’m not sick but I’m not fine

That was me.

I was not sick in a way anybody knew how to name.

No one looked at me and saw a diagnosis. No one sat me down and said, “This boy is carrying fear, shame, confusion, grief, and a hidden self he has no safe place to put.” No one looked at my running, my pot smoking, my cutting school, my lying, my sexual confusion, and my trouble and said, “Something has happened here that needs tenderness.”

They saw behavior.

They saw trouble.

They saw a boy who would not stay where he was supposed to stay.

A boy who would not go to school.

A boy who would not obey.

A boy who kept choosing the road over the room.

From the outside, maybe I looked rebellious.

From the inside, I was not fine.

They saw behavior.

That line matters to me now because behavior is often the first thing we use to define a person.

We say somebody is difficult.

Lazy.

Angry.

Addicted.

Unreliable.

Rebellious.

We take what we can see and turn it into an explanation for the whole person.

Sometimes we even turn it into their identity.

I know that because it happened to me.

I also know I’ve done it to other people.

Most of us have.

We’re often more comfortable judging behavior than becoming curious about pain.

Judgment gives us a quick answer.

Understanding asks us to stay in the room longer.

Understanding doesn’t mean pretending that harmful choices don’t matter.

Trauma isn’t an eraser.

It doesn’t remove accountability or undo the hurt we may cause.

But accountability and understanding don’t have to be enemies.

We can tell the truth about what someone did while also asking what happened to them.

That second question changed my life.

For years, I asked:

What’s wrong with me?

Why couldn’t I stay?

Why did I keep running?

Why could freedom feel unsafe?

Why could love feel dangerous when it came too close?

Why did I keep leaving rooms I desperately wanted to belong in?

Eventually, the question became:

What happened to me?

That question didn’t make me innocent.

It made me understandable.

And becoming understandable to myself was one of the first forms of mercy I experienced.

I’m not suggesting that every difficult behavior has the same explanation.

I’m not trying to diagnose everybody we find hard to understand.

I’m saying there may be more truth beneath the behavior than the behavior can tell us by itself.

A child may not know how to say:

I don’t feel safe.

I’m carrying shame.

I’m afraid that love can disappear.

I have feelings I’ve been taught I’m not allowed to have.

A child may only know how to run.

An adult may still be running without realizing the danger ended years ago.

That doesn’t make every place we run toward healthy.

It doesn’t make every decision harmless.

But it helps explain why simply telling someone to behave differently may not reach the place where the behavior began.

That’s where music entered my life.

The guitar gave my hands somewhere to go.

Songs gave my feelings somewhere to live.

I could write something before I was ready to understand it.

I could sing something before I was ready to say it in conversation.

“Festival of Time” didn’t explain my life.

It didn’t diagnose me.

But it recognized something.

I’m not sick, but I’m not fine.

There’s a lot of life inside that sentence.

It refuses two easy conclusions.

The first is that nothing is wrong.

The second is that the person is nothing more than what’s wrong.

I wasn’t fine.

But I wasn’t beyond reach.

I wasn’t beyond understanding.

And I certainly wasn’t beyond grace.

The song also contains a prayer:

Would you shine some feeling into my eyes?
Would you shine some easiness into my mind?

I didn’t have the theological language I have now.

God had become tangled with fear, judgment, and the feeling that I was always failing some test.

But something in me continued reaching.

Even when I didn’t know whether God was safe, I still whispered the name.

Looking back, I don’t hear spiritual failure in that reaching.

I hear longing.

I hear somebody asking for a little room inside his own mind.

I hear a person who hadn’t given up on mercy, even though he didn’t yet know what mercy could feel like.

Healthy faith, as I understand it now, should help us see the whole person.

It shouldn’t make us quicker to condemn.

It should make us more willing to become curious.

More willing to listen.

More willing to hold accountability and compassion in the same hands.

Jesus repeatedly saw people others had reduced to a label.

The outcast.

The sinner.

The unclean.

The unacceptable.

He didn’t pretend their lives had no complications.

But he refused to treat the label as the whole person.

That continues to challenge me.

Because mercy isn’t only something I hope God offers me.

It’s also a way I’m being taught to see somebody else.

That’s why I’m telling this story now.

Not simply so you’ll know what happened to me.

But because someone around you may be communicating through behavior they don’t yet know how to explain.

That person may even be you.

The behavior still matters.

The consequences may still be real.

But before we decide that the behavior tells us everything, perhaps we can ask one more question.

Not only:

What did this person do?

But also:

What might this person be carrying?

Sometimes the behavior people judge is the language of a wound no one has learned to hear.

Sometimes a song hears it first.

And sometimes mercy begins when somebody finally listens.

I’m Todd Mayson, and this has been Audio Story Time.

You can hear “Festival of Time” and learn more about the music and my memoir, The Altar of My Mind, at toddmayson.com.

Thank you for listening.