Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [30]
In February 1964, when we were born, my mother, Patricia, was just twenty years old and my dad, Richard, was twenty-three. They had met by happenstance. My dad had been in the army, stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, jumping out of planes as part of the 82nd Airborne. One day in 1961, he bummed a ride back home to New Jersey, and when he got there, he decided to attend a dance put on by local firefighters. That’s where he met my mom. She was very pretty and vivacious, and my father was lucky that she gave him her number.
After they got married, my mother had hoped to have a lot of kids, but a series of miscarriages limited her to the two of us. That was enough. We were more than a handful.
From the time we were two years old, Scott and I were fighting with each other daily, sometimes for hours, often destroying things in the house. We’d go at it, fists flying, and we’d accidentally kick in a door or damage the paneling. Then we’d make peace and, starting in our preteens, we’d repair everything together before our parents came home and noticed. “I smell paint!” my father would say when he arrived.
He bought us boxing gloves and a heavy bag when we were six years old and started teaching us how to box. Then he had second thoughts. “If I give them one more lesson they’re going to know enough to kill each other,” he said to my mother, who had already nixed karate lessons for the same reason.
Scott and I were always climbing, too. We’d be outside a restaurant with my parents and if they blinked, we’d go missing. Eventually, they learned to look up. We were usually on the roof, having climbed up the gutters.
My mother says that, starting when we were eighteen months old, Scott and I would talk in this gibberish twin language that only we understood. We were probably plotting something. Later, when we were about five years old, my mother thought we had somehow taught each other Spanish. She was impressed, but we weren’t savants. We were just singing the “Frito Bandito” song.
From the time we could walk, we were neighborhood roamers. One morning before we were two years old, my mother woke up and noticed that we had wet oil stains on the bottom of our footed pajamas. It was a mystery until a neighbor came to the door to tell her we’d been seen that morning hanging around the gas station up the street. While our parents were sleeping, we had unlocked the back door and escaped. They had to install new locks on the doors that were above our reach.
Looking back, I feel like I had a pretty unconventional childhood. In the summers, when the bug-spray truck passed through, my parents would let me and Scott run through the mist of chemicals. People then didn’t know any better, especially in my neighborhood.
While Gabby was growing up as a child of the desert, I was more of an urban menace, palling around with a motley crew of characters.
When I was young, I figured the whole world looked like our neighborhood: a third Jewish, a third Italian, and a third Irish, like us. We lived just twenty minutes from Manhattan, and some of our playmates were the sons of mobsters. Their fathers would get in trouble—my father even arrested some of them—and the children could be troublemakers, too. That’s why my mom insisted that our friends hang out at our house, playing pool in the basement. She wanted to keep an eye on all of us.
The kids in our neighborhood were the types who’d throw things at passing cars just for the laughs. One Halloween, we threw a scarecrow dummy in front of a car. The driver was at first hysterical, thinking she’d killed a pedestrian. It wasn’t until we pulled the scarecrow out from under her car that she was able to breathe again. We’re lucky she didn’t have a heart attack. When Scott and I did completely stupid things like that, and someone called the police, we