Cardboard Crown

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.