We settled in Nashville, where I was an aspiring songwriter. A decade later we were able to buy a summer house on a harbor in Rhode Island. That’s where we were going when the accident happened. We had been traveling in two cars when something went wrong with mine and we stopped in Knoxville at a repair shop. Linda was wearing a blue and white seersucker dress as she and our youngest son, Mac, who was 15, walked to her car. It was the last time I would ever see her walk. As they pulled away, she called out, “See you in a few hours!” and blew a kiss.
I blew one back.
We planned to meet up later at a motel in Allentown.
Have you ever come upon a traffic jam on the Interstate and looked for an exit to try your luck on the back roads? That’s what I did the night of Linda’s accident. I drove right by my family without even knowing it. I bet I wasn’t more than 100 feet away.
It was late. I was impatient. Traffic was stopped in both directions. Finally I managed to move to the shoulder and scoot along to an exit, where I found an empty frontage road running parallel to the highway.
Barely onto it, I saw a cluster of blinking blue lights in the distance. Wow, what happened? I wondered if Linda and Mac were already at the motel, or if they were also stuck in this jam. Then I thought: Could they be in that accident? But wait — of course not. They were way ahead.
A while later I stopped at a diner, where I found a pay phone and dialed the motel. When I asked for the Martine room, the desk clerk said, “There’s someone on the other line calling for Martine, too.”
“Who?”
“Someone from the hospital in Hershey.”
“Can you connect me?”
“No, but they gave me their number.”
I hung up and redialed, my face hot. The woman who answered identified herself as the hospital chaplain. She said my family had been in an accident.
“Are they all right?”
She put the doctor on, who told me that my son was O.K. My wife, however, was a different story.
I listened as he described her condition, then asked, “Can she think?”
“Yes. Her brain is fine.”
And that’s when I knew we could do it, long before I had any idea what “it” was.
Now, 15 years later, we do know.
We know that most people — strangers, anywhere — will knock themselves out to help us if we explain what we need. We know to say “Yes” to nearly everything because there is probably a way to do it. We know there is happiness available every day, most of it requiring more effort than money. And effort seems like a small price to pay for a day at the beach, a trip to New York or for dinner up eight steps to a friend’s home.
A few months after the accident, Linda started driving again. Her car has hand controls. She thinks nothing of driving to visit her father two hours away by herself. She has rolled three marathons — yes, a full 26-plus miles in a racing wheelchair.
And now, so long since that fateful night, looking across the dinner table at my wife, or seeing her across the room at a party, the hopeless crush I have on her is as wonderfully out of control as when I first saw her more than four decades ago through the screen door. I still get excited after work when I pull in the driveway and know that I’ll soon get to see the sexy, beautiful, very funny person I live with. And, later on, snuggle up to her in bed.
We’ve rolled up and down the hills of Tuscany, squeezed into pubs in Ireland, explored narrow streets in Paris and Rome, gone to Red Sox games, had coffee in the sunshine in San Francisco, Portland, Chicago and Miami. And we’ve learned that alongside great loss we can still have a great life. We want it so badly, and we love it so much.
At sunset, as we sit on the deck of our house in Rhode Island in our side-by-side chairs — mine Adirondack-style, hers on wheels — we look across the water at Fishers Island and think we are as lucky as two people can be.
We don’t know what will happen tomorrow, or who will live how long. But we were young together. We struggled to make a life. We raised three great sons. We’ve each been the caregiver and the cared-for, and I suspect that we each have a little more of both in our future.
We are two, but we are one. And I love those numbers.
Layng Martine Jr. is an American songwriter. A member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame,1 he was the writer of “Rub It In”, a number one country hit for Billy “Crash” Craddock in 1974, which became the long-running TV commercial “Plug It In”2 for Johnson & Johnson’s Glade Plug-ins air freshening product.3 This song was previously a No. 65 single on the Billboard Hot 100 for Martine himself in 1971, whose version was released on Barnaby Records.4Some of Martine’s other writing credits include Elvis Presley’s million seller “Way Down”, The Pointer Sisters’ Top Ten “Should I Do It” and Trisha Yearwood’s “I Wanna Go Too Far”. He was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1993 for Best Country Song, for co-writing Reba McEntire’s “The Greatest Man I Never Knew”.
Martine authored an article for The New York Times Modern Love column about his continued love story with his wife Linda after she became a paraplegic after a car accident.5 The couple has three sons, one of whom is musician and producer Tucker Martine.6
Songs written
- “Don’t Boogie Woogie When You Say Your Prayers Tonight” – Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Stevens, Eddy Mitchell
- “Everybody Needs a Rainbow” – Ray Stevens
- “The Greatest Man I Never Knew” – Reba McEntire
- “I Don’t Want to Be a One Night Stand” – Reba McEntire
- “I Wanna Go Too Far” – Trisha Yearwood
- “I Was Blown Away” – Pam Tillis
- “Let Me On” – Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins
- “Maybe She’s Human” – Kathy Mattea
- “Rub It In” – Billy “Crash” Craddock7
- “Should I Do It” – The Pointer Sisters
- “Too Fast for Rapid City” – Sheila Andrews
- “You Got The Job” – Charly McClain
- “Way Down” – Elvis Presley
“Way Down” is a song recorded by Elvis Presley. Recorded in October 1976, it was his last single released before his death on August 16, 1977. The song was written by Layng Martine, Jr. and was later covered by Status Quo and Cliffhanger. Presley recorded the song at his home studio in Graceland on 29 October 1976.
Released as a single (with “Pledging My Love” on the B-side) on June 6, 1977, it was his single at the time of his death. It initially peaked at No. 31 on the BillboardHot 100 chart dated August 6, 1977 and had fallen to No. 53 on the chart for the week ending August 27, 1977. Thereafter, it reversed direction and reached an even higher peak at No. 18 on 24 September – 1 October 1977. “Way Down” reached No. 1 on the American Country chart the week he died.1 Overseas, the song hit the number one in the UK Singles Chart week ending 3 September for five weeks, 2 just over seven years after his previous 16th UK number one single, “The Wonder of You”, in August 1970. His previous single, “Moody Blue”, had been a number one hit on the US Country Charts earlier in 1977. “Way Down” was reissued in April 2005 and reached No. 2 on the UK Singles Chart.3
The recording also featured J.D. Sumnersinging the words “way on down” at the end of each chorus down to the note low C (C2). At the end of the song, this phrase is octaved, reaching a double low C (C1, three octaves below middle C).4 This note was first accomplished by Sumner in a 1966 recording of the hymn “Blessed Assurance.”
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