Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [6]
One night in Rome, Gabby and I broke away from her parents and had dinner with an official from the European Space Agency and the physicist heading a major project on my space shuttle mission. We were on the top floor of this terrific restaurant, and talk turned to politics in both Italy and the States. Gabby and I explained how heated her election had been.
“It’s gotten so nasty,” I said. “It’s almost like people are going to get violent.”
Gabby agreed with me, though she always had a way of putting a positive spin on a negative discussion. “Yeah, things have gone a bit over the line,” she said. “We’ll just have to figure out a way to pull it back a little.”
We flew home to the States and spent New Year’s Eve in Charleston, South Carolina, at the annual retreat known as Renaissance Weekend. When people hear about this event, they always think that you’re dressing up like a knight and eating giant turkey legs. But it’s actually just a relaxed, nonpartisan gathering where people from different walks of life, many of them very accomplished, gather to discuss issues and have fun together. This year, Gabby sang in the Renaissance Weekend choir, which puts together smart, funny lyrics about current events.
A lot of people bring their children, and Gabby and I came with my daughters, Claudia and Claire, then fifteen and thirteen. The girls love these annual weekends, too. They get to spend time with Olympic athletes, Nobel laureates, scientists, professors. Over the years, we’ve met Ted Sorensen, a speechwriter for John F. Kennedy; Thurgood Marshall, Jr., son of the Supreme Court justice; Li Lu, a student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests; and the diplomat Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, the covert CIA agent whose identity was famously leaked by political opponents in 2003.
For a guy like me, the son of cops, it’s a crowd I certainly wasn’t hanging out with as a kid. But I feel fortunate that I can offer such experiences to my girls. It’s a perk of being an astronaut married to a rising young politician; we get invited places. Over the years, we’ve made some close friends at Renaissance Weekend—such as the NPR host Scott Simon and his wife, Caroline—who’d end up being there for us in unexpected ways in the wake of Gabby’s injury.
The New Year’s Eve celebration at this year’s retreat was fairly low-key, and near midnight, Gabby and I found ourselves sitting at a table, thinking about the twelve months we’d just been through. Her reelection campaign had been so wearying and hard. “The coming year will be better,” I told her, and she agreed.
“Absolutely,” she said. “A lot of good things are going to happen.”
On Sunday, January 2, Claudia and Claire flew home to Houston to go back to school, and Gabby and I drove north together, toward Washington, D.C., where, on Wednesday, she’d be sworn in for her third term. I took three days off from work so I could be with her.
The weather was pretty rotten on our drive, a lot of rain, but we were grateful just to be alone together. Given our crazy schedules, there are many days each year when we’re apart. Granted, ours was not the usual marriage, but it was working for us because we valued the time we did have for each other. People would say we acted like perpetual newlyweds, which sounds pretty saccharine, but that’s how we felt.
Sure, maybe we’d argue more if we lived in the same city. Maybe we’d get on each other’s nerves more. Maybe a baby would add an unavoidable level of tension. We understood that. But on the other hand, maybe our bonds became stronger because we logged an hour