She was 21, and I was We married soon after. 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. 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. 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?
I drove right by my family without even knowing it. 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.
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They were way ahead. A while later I stopped at a diner, where I found a pay phone and dialed the motel. 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. She put the doctor on, who told me that my son was O. We knew we had a lot to learn, but we had no idea how much.
Hearing the word paraplegic had made us focus on the big thing, the fact that Linda could no longer walk. Less anticipated were the smaller humiliations and inconveniences, like bowel movements in bed or on the way to a party, sores that came out of nowhere and took months or years to heal, and inaccessible restroom stalls that caused Linda to have to catheterize herself in the public area where people were washing their hands and talking. And on it went, the list of indignities. She could no longer feel sexual intercourse and the powerful muscle spasms in her legs threatened to crush anyone who tried.
I have been crazy about Linda since the first time I saw her. We always felt we could handle any challenge because we were facing it together. This time we knew we had the will, but the demands were so exhausting, the changes so pervasive, that sometimes we wondered how we would cope. Not long after getting home from the hospital, when we were having dinner by candlelight at our kitchen table, she burst into tears. We began to think of what we could do to replace playing tennis, walking on the beach, working in the garden.
Since Linda loves the ocean, a friend found a specially designed beach chair made of PVC tubing with wide inflated tires that allow it to be pushed across the sand. She laughed like crazy, then repeated it to everyone she knew. A few summers later, one of our three sons suggested that he and I get on either side of the chair, slide Linda off, carry her into the ocean and drop her just beyond the waves so she could float calmly behind the crashing breakers.
So we took it off, and to our surprise she bobbed peacefully, looking once again like every other person lolling in the sea on a summer day. You know those great old stores on Newbury Street in Boston with five or six steps up to each one? At first we could get up only about three of those a day. Now we can do every single store, one right after the other, all day long. She has no stomach muscles. Her body works only from the chest up. I remember the day we had to tell her that. She was in the I.
The doctor and I stood on either side of her bed. She looked at him. Her eyes shifted over to me. I squeezed her hand gently. After the doctor left, tears filled her eyes.
And it did seem that way. It always had.
She was 21, and I was View all New York Times newsletters. We married soon after. We settled in Nashville , where I was an aspiring songwriter. Except humour. And maybe high intelligence.
I suspect you can even be a bit dim-witted and still be charming, for a while. But once the dimness manifests itself — as it always will, like water from a concealed leak — the charm quickly grows rusty. First comes physical beauty — which is itself a form of charm, of physical intelligence. A beautiful complexion or a beautiful line are, in fact, the expression of the highest intelligence. The same could be said of charm, except that charm is a privilege you can work at and cultivate, as opposed to something you are born with beauty.
Two further thoughts on charm and physical beauty. This seems hard to believe given the huge impediment of his face. And models seem often to have a haughtiness that is the opposite of charming. You can be charming without a sense of humour but once the lack of humour becomes obvious the charm dissolves in its wake. Charming people can be bores in a way that witty people never are.