The Tall Note already became something many never do. He became a man who felt deeply without surrendering entirely to bitterness, who was wounded without making cruelty his religion, who carried gifts and grief in the same large frame and kept walking. For a father looking on, that is not failure waiting to be corrected. That is success already in the room, whether the room notices or not.
People have always looked at my eldest boy and made the first mistake that size invites. They see the frame before they see the person. At somewhere around two hundred and five centimetres and built like a front gate that forgot how to bend, he enters a room the way weather enters a district. Heads turn first out of instinct, then curiosity. On a football field he looks like the sort of man who should be charging through walls or frightening small defenders into reconsidering their sporting choices. Then he moves. That is where the assumptions begin to collapse. For a giant, he carries an almost unfair amount of speed, the kind that startles people who thought they had already measured him. Life has done that to him more than once. It has let people think they understood him at a glance, only to reveal they had seen the outline and missed the substance.
I will call him The Tall Note, because height is the least interesting thing about him and music is one of the ways his soul learned to speak when words were not enough.
Children from broken homes often become experts in emotional geography. They learn routes between houses, tones of voice, what can be said here and what should wait until there. They become diplomats before they become adults. Both his mother and I tried hard to remain present in his youth, and that matters more than fashionable commentary ever admits. Effort counts. Presence counts. Imperfect people still loving their children counts. Yet even when adults do their best, there are fractures children feel in ways no one can fully repair. Some kids become rebels, some comedians, some ghosts. My boy became thoughtful. He watched everything. He listened more than he spoke. He developed that quick intelligence that can solve problems in a room while still being unable to mend the ache in a heart.
He was blessed and burdened with a mind that runs ahead of traffic. High intelligence is romanticised by people who do not have to live inside it. They imagine brilliance as a spotlight. More often it is fluorescent lighting at three in the morning when everyone else is asleep and your own thoughts refuse to clock off. He could see angles, hear patterns, understand systems, grasp humour layered inside humour. He could also overthink pain with the same efficiency. Sharp minds cut both ways.
Then came the event that split time into before and after.
A close mate of his, though the friendship had drifted into that odd territory young men know where affection survives even when pride and circumstance create distance, was struck on a pedestrian crossing and killed. There is no graceful sentence for such things. A life was there, then it was not. Worse still, because the young bloke had ridden to cricket practice on his bike and left valuables at home to keep the weight down, he carried no licence, no obvious identifier, nothing that quickly told the world who he was. For several days he was unnamed.
That detail lodged in my son like shrapnel. Death is hard enough for the living. But anonymity after death, the thought of a person lying somewhere unknown, disconnected from their people, weighed on him in a way some could not understand. He was haunted less by the fact of death than by the loneliness of it. He imagined the body waiting in silence while the world carried on, as if identity itself had been misplaced. Some people process grief through tears, some through anger, some through practical tasks. He processed it through imagination, and imagination can be merciless.
I watched a young man trying to carry something that did not belong solely to him. Survivor’s guilt often disguises itself as philosophy. He asked questions no one can answer. Could someone have known sooner. Could someone have looked harder. What sort of world leaves a person unidentified. What did his mate feel in those last moments. The dead rarely trouble themselves with these things. The living do enough of it for everybody.
There are losses that become private engines. They run underneath everything that follows. You cannot always hear them, but they are there in the vibration. In my son’s case, grief did not make him smaller. It made him deeper, though depth has its own price.
Music became one of the languages through which he could breathe. Some people play songs. Others use songs as excavation equipment. He was the latter. He was talented enough to find work in a dream environment for a musician, landing almost the perfect job with Roland, surrounded by instruments and technology, the kind of place where sound is treated seriously. For many, that would have been enough validation. For him, it was merely one station on a longer line.
He wrote. He composed. He built worlds from chords and confession. He formed a band with the sort of name only youth or genius can carry without embarrassment, and wrote songs that did not hide from darkness. Depression, fear, loss, isolation, all the things polite society likes softened or hidden behind wellness slogans, he dragged into the open and gave melody. One song title alone told you he was not interested in pretending life was all sunshine and beach towels. He understood that some thoughts are dangerous precisely because they are common and unspoken.
There are people who hear songs only as entertainment. They miss what many songs truly are: evidence. A lyric can be a flare fired into the night. A chorus can be someone saying I am still here. When my son wrote about despair, I never assumed he was performing misery for effect. I knew he was negotiating with shadows many never see.
Twice he won the same category in an international songwriting competition, something no one else had done. That matters, not because trophies define worth, but because excellence recognised from afar can sometimes remind a person that their private struggle has public value. Somewhere beyond family bias and mate loyalty, strangers judged the work and found it exceptional. As a father, I was proud. As an observer of human nature, I was amused. The world often ignores talent until a certificate arrives.
Yet achievement has never guaranteed escape. That is another lie we tell the young. We imply talent creates a direct road. It does not. It creates possibility, and possibility still has toll booths.
So there he was, a giant with brains, speed, musical gifts and cinematic ambition, working jobs that felt borrowed from someone else’s story. Traffic control. Prison guard. Shift work and fluorescent lights. Stop signs in the rain. Locked gates and institutional corridors. The kind of roles people take while telling themselves this is temporary. Sometimes it is. Sometimes temporary grows roots.
I would think of that old song about the girl from Omaha working dead-end jobs while dreaming of the pictures. There are thousands like her, and thousands like him, living in the waiting room of their own imagined future. Society can be cruel in the way it measures such people. It asks what they do instead of what they carry. It values payroll titles over unmade art. It mistakes delay for defeat.
He wanted the movies too, not in the childish sense of wanting applause, but in the deeper sense of wanting to create. He wrote, produced and starred in his own projects, including a short fan film, Hero, a Star Wars fan film, built from beloved mythology and personal effort. People who have never made anything underestimate what it takes to finish even a small production. To write is hard. To organise is harder. To expose yourself on screen harder still. To do all three while holding ordinary jobs and ordinary disappointments requires a stubbornness bordering on noble madness.
That stubbornness did not come from nowhere.
Families pass down many things besides money. We pass down temperaments, fears, humour, unfinished business, appetites, silences, reflexes. Sometimes we pass down speed on a football field. Sometimes restlessness. Sometimes the need to prove oneself to a world that never specifically asked. I can see parts of myself in him and parts that are wholly his own. That is both comforting and confronting. Parenthood is the long study of watching your traits reappear wearing someone else’s face.
He could be difficult, as all worthwhile people can. Intelligence often resists foolish authority. Sensitivity sometimes dresses itself as withdrawal. Big men can intimidate rooms without intending to. Creative people can appear lazy when they are actually mentally wrestling ten invisible opponents. He has known frustration, periods of drift, anger at the gap between potential and reality. He has likely scared people who only understand tidy narratives.
But I have also seen kindnesses that never make resumes. Loyalty shown after disappointment. Concern for the forgotten. Generosity with talent. Humour deployed to rescue heavy moments. The ability to stand physically imposing while remaining emotionally porous. That combination is rarer than people think.
The world worships finished products. It likes the actor once famous, the songwriter once platinum, the athlete once decorated. It struggles with people still becoming. My son has spent years in that difficult territory of becoming. There is no medal ceremony for perseverance in obscurity. No marching band for continuing after setbacks. No applause for going to work while carrying dreams that did not arrive on schedule.
From a parent’s point of view, however, the ledger looks different.
I do not only count wages, credits, titles or headlines. I count surviving grief that could have bent him permanently. I count creating beauty out of pain. I count using intelligence without becoming cruel. I count getting back up after ordinary jobs tried to tell him who he was. I count remaining capable of hope in a cynical age. I count the fact that he still wants something, because desire itself can be a victory when life has handed out enough disappointment.
He may still think fame and fortune are somewhere up the road, waiting behind the next audition, next script, next song, next break. Perhaps they are. Stranger things have happened. But if they never come in the form magazines recognise, it will not alter the truth as I see it.
The Tall Note already became something many never do. He became a man who felt deeply without surrendering entirely to bitterness, who was wounded without making cruelty his religion, who carried gifts and grief in the same large frame and kept walking. For a father looking on, that is not failure waiting to be corrected. That is success already in the room, whether the room notices or not.
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