What the Wood Remembers

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.