Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [27]
In any case, the next day Gloria drove to Flagstaff and gave Gabby’s trainer what she calls the “stern eyeball.” “Listen,” Gloria said, “the reason I got this girl this horse was so that it would be a substitute for boys. I know this is the Wild West, but I don’t want my daughter to be a wild woman at age fourteen.”
Gloria didn’t have to worry. Gabby would become a serious, accomplished student at Tucson’s University High School, a public school for gifted students. She wowed many of her teachers, who found her to be winningly engaging and self-confident. They saw her as a very bright, optimistic young woman who was excited to find ways to make her contribution to the world.
Gabby has often talked to me about how her upbringing and her Tucson roots shaped her and strengthened her. When she was young, she knew she wanted to make a difference, but she wasn’t exactly sure what path she’d take in life. She didn’t ever say she wanted to grow up to be a congresswoman. And yet I now see that, starting in childhood, all these steps along the way combined with fate and happenstance—and a commitment to her family—to bring her to where she is today.
When Gabby left Tucson for college in 1988, she never would have imagined that, just nine years later, she’d be back in town running the family tire business, following in the footsteps of her grandfather Gif Giffords by starring in her own El Campo commercials.
She couldn’t have guessed that those commercials would make her a recognized face in southeastern Arizona, helping to spark her political career. Or that her political career would almost cost her her life, leading her to a rehabilitation hospital in Houston. Or that in rehab she’d be sitting with her devoted mother, singing “Tomorrow,” her childhood song of hope, as a way of reconnecting the damaged pathways in her brain.
CHAPTER FIVE
A Family of Risk-Takers
It was the ninety-third day of my brother’s second mission to the International Space Station. He had flown there as an American astronaut aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and was serving as commander of the ISS.
As morning broke in the United States, Scott was hard at work, attempting a vital repair job that he didn’t want to entrust to any of his crew members. This was something best left to the commander.
“There are two pieces of equipment in space that are the most important,” Scott likes to say, “and both of them are toilets.”
And so for two hours on that Saturday, Scott had been trying to fix a broken toilet, which is a difficult and complicated task in space, considering how complex a space toilet is. If he couldn’t get it working, and the other toilet failed, too, he and his crew would be left using bags to relieve themselves, and then they’d have to store the bags. It would not be pleasant. Scott knew that much depended on his efforts.
While he was working, he got a call from the CAPCOM, the “capsule communicator” in Houston. That’s the person on the ground, usually a fellow astronaut, whose job it is to remain in constant touch with the crew of a manned space flight.
“Scott, we’re going to privatize the space-to-ground channel,” the CAPCOM said. “Peggy wants to talk to you.”
Peggy Whitson is chief of the astronaut office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The arranging of a private line meant that Peggy wanted to make sure her conversation with Scott couldn’t be monitored by the public, the media, or anyone else within the space program. Such a procedure almost always indicates that an astronaut is about to get very bad personal news. Suddenly the toilet issue seemed unimportant to Scott.
He floated into another module on the space station and awaited Peggy’s call. It took five minutes to set up the private line, in which time Scott traveled 1,460 miles through space, while the thoughts in his mind seemed to be moving even faster. Had one of his