Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [33]
I had always assumed that my parents viewed me as someone bright enough to go to college. Now here they were, telling me that maybe I wasn’t. It was hurtful.
Until then, my school day had been spent looking out the window or staring at the clock, waiting for class to be over. But after my dad’s lecture, I decided to start paying attention. I would tell myself, “I’m going to sit in this class and try to understand whatever it is the teacher is saying. I’m going to read whatever she puts on the board. I’m going to understand all of it.”
The way I remember it, that’s all it took. Starting in ninth grade, and for all the years that followed, I was nearly a straight-A student.
As my parents see it, my transformation, and Scott’s, too, was not as abrupt as we remember it. In their own way, they’d been trying to show us the light, usually by example.
My mother decided she wanted to become a cop in 1975, when she was thirty-two. She’d been a waitress and a secretary but wanted a greater challenge. Thanks to a class-action suit, the state of New Jersey had just changed the weight and height requirements for police officers, which meant women could qualify. My mother was determined to be the first woman in our community to be hired.
Scott and I, then eleven years old, watched her train two hours a day for the physical. Her exercises were posted on the refrigerator. To pass the test, she’d have to scale a seven-foot-four-inch wall in nine seconds. My father built a wall out of plywood in our backyard, and without telling her, he made it seven feet, five inches tall. She spent two months trying to get over it, but never could. Then she figured out the secret: She had to run, hit the board with her left foot, use the momentum to grab the top of the wall, and then flip over it. She was able to scale the thing in just four seconds.
As part of the test, she’d also need to drag a 125-pound dummy seventy-five feet in twelve seconds. She used Scott as her dummy, which made sense to me, and dragged him around the backyard.
When she finally took the test, she passed easily, coming in fifty-sixth out of more than three hundred applicants, almost all of them men.
Scott and I had accompanied her to the test. We saw her actually jump in the air and kick up her heels when she passed. We saw her wipe away tears.
My mother knows that Scott and I think she didn’t push us enough. She didn’t make us study for hours every night. But she believes, and she’s surely right, that we developed our ambition and our drive in part by watching her.
“You knew how badly I wanted to be a police officer, and that I’d been told I’d never get the job,” she says. “You saw how hard I worked at it day after day. You saw my determination. Maybe watching me helped you.”
For his part, my father thinks he may have told us things that, somewhere along the way, sank in. He recalls standing on the beach with me and Scott when we were maybe twelve years old. We were all looking into the water. “These friends you’re hanging out with, a lot of them will never leave West Orange,” my dad said. “They’re not looking beyond the horizon. But you two, you need to remember that there’s something over that horizon. Go look for it. Go find it. Go do it!”
I don’t think we were really listening, but the way our lives turned out, we must have heard him.
Unlike Gabby, who was born as an overachiever, my brother and I had a late start. But once we got the urge to succeed, we took off.
At Mountain High School in West Orange, both of us wanted to run for student congress president our senior year. Rather than duke it out like we used to, we took a mature approach, flipping a coin. I won the coin toss and the election, and Scott served as vice president.