Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [32]
“But, Dad, what about the sharks?” we asked, almost in unison.
My father took out his gun—he was a cop, after all—and said, “If they come too close, I’ve got you covered. Now get in the water!” Maybe the sharks heard my father and knew he was aiming for them. They left us alone and we freed the boat.
Suffice it to say that flying in space is not necessarily the riskiest thing we’ve ever done.
My mother, meanwhile, has her own history of putting herself in peril. In the mid-1970s, she became the first female police officer in West Orange and one of the first in the state. She was always pretty fearless. One night, she got dispatched to a home where a man in his twenties had killed his parents and was holding his sister hostage. When my mom arrived with a partner at 3 a.m., the young man was shooting out the window. My mother took cover on a dirt patch outside the house, only it wasn’t just dirt. “Oh my God, I’m in dog shit,” my mother said to herself, “and if I stick my head up, I could be shot.” She stayed sprawled for two hours atop that stinking pile, her gun poised, until reinforcements came and the gunman surrendered.
My mother tells people: “The boys don’t fear being astronauts, because they were born into a family of risk-takers. It’s in our blood.” Her father was a New York City fireboat captain. Her sister is a retired FBI agent. Her brother is a retired cop.
In 1982, my mother was seriously injured on the job. It happened on a night she was in a squad car alone, patrolling behind a strip mall. She saw two men with a large garbage bag and asked them what they were doing. They scuffled with her as she tried to grab the bag—she never learned what was in it—and then they knocked her down and ran off. She ended up falling fifteen feet into a creek behind the store, ruining her back and knees. She was up to her armpits in water and couldn’t get herself out. She ended up retiring on disability, and she still copes with daily pain from that incident.
My dad warned us not to be police officers. He described his job as being “a human garbageman.” “The job sucks everything out of you,” he told us. “If you want to be cops I’ll break your legs.”
We assumed he didn’t mean it, because he seemed to like his job. And, at least when we were very young, a career in law enforcement felt like an option. We talked about being astronauts, like a lot of kids do, but we certainly didn’t think we’d make it. Astronauts were usually academic all-stars, which Scott and I most definitely were not.
My parents weren’t on top of us to do our schoolwork. They didn’t give us the suburban mantra: “Study hard and you’ll be a success.” But they did have a blue-collar work ethic that spoke to their aspirations for Scott and me. “You both have the ability to do anything in this world if you try hard enough,” they’d say. They knew we were both bright underachievers. Unlike some of our teachers, they liked to think that nothing was beyond our potential.
Sometimes they had to fight to make their point.
At our fourth-grade parent-teacher conference, our teacher told my parents that both Scott and I had learning disabilities. My father was having none of it. “You’re out of your mind, lady!” he said to her. “We’ll be back tomorrow with a real expert, and we’re not going to sit in these little chairs, either.”
His expert was his mother-in-law. My grandmother happened to be a learning-disabilities specialist, and she had tested us. She explained to the teacher that we were rambunctious boys with very high IQs. My father had the last word. “I think someone should be testing the teacher!”
Through junior high, my grades, like my brother’s, were mostly embarrassing—Cs and Ds—and my father got tired of our academic indifference. Eventually he came up with a plan, and he started with me. “I’ve set up a deal for you,” he said. “I’m going to get you into the welders’ union. I’ve got a contact there.”
A part of him was being realistic. Given