Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [12]
Gabby was, as always, very cheerful as she recorded her message: “Hi, this is your congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, inviting you to a one-on-one meeting. I am hosting Congress on Your Corner this Saturday at the Safeway located at 7110 North Oracle. That’s the southeast corner of Oracle and Ina. I’ll be there with my staff from ten to eleven thirty a.m. to meet with you and answer any of your questions about what is going on in Congress. For more information, please call 881-3588. Again, this is Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and I hope to meet with you in person this Saturday!”
The robo call went out to the homes of about twenty thousand constituents, including the residence of a very troubled young man who had attended an event with Gabby in the past. None of us, of course, could have anticipated the ramifications of Gabby’s decision to host a COYC event and to record that robo call. We couldn’t have imagined that it would be the modern-day equivalent of publishing the route of John F. Kennedy’s motorcade in 1963.
At the time, for Gabby and her staffers, it was all in a day’s work.
Gabby returned to Tucson on Friday evening. Her close friend Raoul Erickson picked her up at the airport, and though it was cold, they suited up and went on a ten-mile bike ride on a trail not far from Gabby’s condominium. They had dinner together, too, at one of their regular haunts, Char’s Thai on Fifth Street, where as usual, they asked for their favorite waitress, a friendly fifty-five-year-old woman named Toi.
“Toi died today,” they were told. The news made for a somber meal. “It feels like a funeral,” Gabby said to Raoul at one point. She thought she’d end up remembering this weekend because of the unexpected death of an admired waitress.
On Saturday morning, Gabby called me while driving her green Toyota 4Runner over to the Safeway. I was at home in Houston, and it was a quick conversation. “I’m on my way to the Congress on Your Corner,” she said. “I’ll call you when it’s over.”
“OK, sweetie,” I answered. As always, we both said “I love you.”
A few minutes after we’d hung up, Gabby got a text from Pam Simon, the sixty-three-year-old outreach coordinator in her Tucson office. “It’s chilly out here. Be sure to dress warm,” wrote Pam, who had already gone inside the nearby Walgreens to buy mittens.
Gabby replied: “Too late. I’m on my way.” She was wearing a light red jacket and a black skirt.
Five of her staffers were at the Safeway waiting for her, including Gabe, who had made good on his promise to pull off the event without a hitch. Helped by two interns, the staffers had brought several blue-cushioned folding chairs and a folding table from the office, along with an American flag, an Arizona flag, and a banner that read “Gabrielle Giffords, United States Congress.”
At about 9:55, Gabby pulled into the parking lot, and before leaving her car, she took out her iPad and typed a message: “My 1st Congress on Your Corner starts now. Please stop by to let me know what is on your mind or tweet me later.”
Though the Founding Fathers never tweeted, and though they never saw a woman in Congress, their idealism lived on in Gabby. As this new year began, Gabby was right where she wanted to be, on this corner, the intersection of Oracle and Ina, in her hometown of Tucson, meeting her fellow citizens to hear about their needs. Despite everything, she believed in the possibilities of elected office, and she accepted the risks embedded in the constitutional guarantees of freedom. She thought that it was her job to go out in public, to listen to people, and to help them if she could. I missed her on days like this, but I admired her. I had learned early on that I would be sharing my wife with the world.
On this Saturday morning at Safeway, fifteen constituents, including a nine-year-old