The Music Is Still Playing

Yesterday I was sitting on the deck with my headphones on, in the corner where the sun shines the brightest. I have a chair there now, surrounded by the gourds growing along the sides of the deck railing.

As I sat there listening to music, I suddenly remembered something.

Years ago, when I had my first camcorder, I filmed my Uncle Mick sitting in that very same corner. I was standing down below in the yard with the camera pointed up toward him. He was sitting there with headphones on too, listening to his Walkman.

All these years later, without even thinking about it, there I was doing the same thing.

Uncle Mick passed away in 2009. He faced more adversity in one lifetime than I can understand. He lived with cerebral palsy, lost the vision in one eye, developed cancer, and eventually lost his sight completely. I still wonder sometimes how one person could be asked to endure so much.

Yet somehow, he never allowed those things to define the spirit of the man he was.

He enjoyed the simple things in life. He loved music. And through everything he endured, he maintained a positive attitude. To me, that made him something of a superhero—not because he was untouched by suffering, but because of the strength of his heart and mind while his body continued to fail him.

I lived with him my entire life. He wasn't only my uncle. In many ways, he was like an older brother.

One of the things that stays with me most is how, even during some of the hardest periods of his own life, he could still find the strength to care about what I was going through. I remember struggling after a breakup with a girl I had been dating. Looking back now, it almost seems backwards. Here was a man dealing with circumstances far greater than mine, and somehow he was the one consoling me.

That was Mick.

There is another memory I carry with me.

I remember playing guitar for him in his room. That room is my music studio today.

He looked at me and made me promise that I would never give up on music.

I promised him I wouldn't.

And I have kept that promise to this day.

Music is a gift God gave me to share with the world. Through whatever I have gone through in my own life, music has been there. It has carried me through darkness and helped lead me back toward the light.

And I am incredibly thankful that I had an uncle who loved music enough to introduce me to so many different sounds and genres from long before my time.

Maybe that's part of why yesterday affected me the way it did.

There I was, sitting in Mick's old spot on the deck, sunlight coming through, gourds growing around me, headphones over my ears.

The Walkman is gone. The camcorder is old now. Mick has been gone for seventeen years.

But the music is still playing.

And I'm still keeping my promise.

© Nathaniel Maloney. All rights reserved.