Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [61]
Gabby decided to borrow a Vera Wang gown from the daughter of Suzy Gershman, her wedding planner. She liked that I would be wearing my formal dress Navy uniform, also white and reusable.
Gabby’s mom, Gloria, came up with the idea for our wedding invitation. In Mexico, Spain, Germany, and Italy, when something wonderful or miraculous happens, there’s a tradition that a small painting, a “retablo,” is created describing it. People hang it in their church, giving thanks. In Mexico, one popular and humorous version of such a painting features a dashing young man, a sombrero in one hand and flowers in the other, courting a lovely woman in a courtyard. She sits on a bench with a shawl on her shoulders, her head turned toward the man. The image of a saint is in a nearby tree, looking over them. But the painting also contains some tension. Around the corner is a man with a gun in his hand, undoubtedly the young woman’s father, ready to chase the male suitor away.
Gabby and Gloria thought it would be amusing if they used this painting on the top flap of the invitation. With Photoshop, they removed the father’s hair so he’d look more like Gabby’s balding dad, Spencer. And the woman in the courtyard, originally a brunette, was turned into a blonde so she’d look more like Gabby. (I nixed Gloria’s idea of putting a NASA patch on the man’s jacket. NASA is careful about the use of its logos and designs. I’d become sensitive about the minutiae that could earn an astronaut a trip to the front office.)
At the time, not all of our guests knew what to make of this image. They just figured, correctly, that it was Gabby and her artistic mother doing something creative that reflected “borderland” culture. Looking at that invitation in retrospect, of course, yields a different impression, as if it foreshadowed what was to come. The painting now feels stark and troubling. A man and a woman have fallen in love, that’s obvious, but their relationship is being threatened by a hairless, sinister-looking man holding a gun.
The farm we rented for the wedding was called Agua Linda, and Gabby thought the setting she chose for the ceremony was perfect: a mesquite-covered lawn with the Santa Rita Mountains behind us. The food she ordered from Las Vigas, a local restaurant, was a regional Mexican-American mix of steak, potatoes, and made-on-the-spot tortillas.
Our wedding party was a little different in that each of us had a member of the opposite sex among our attendants. Gabby’s friend Raoul stood up for her—a bridesmaid in a suit—along with three of her friends, her sister, and my daughters, Claudia and Claire. Three of my four groomsmen were astronauts, including my brother and Buster’s mom, a groomsman in a dress. I also asked Mark Baden to stand up for me. He was the guy who dared me to steal that Saudi flag, and he later became a Navy A-6 Intruder pilot, like me, and then a pilot for United Airlines. We all walked down the aisle accompanied by the music of a mariachi band.
It was also important to Gabby that we be married in a Jewish ceremony.
She was raised as the product of a mixed marriage; Spencer, a Jew, and Gloria, a Christian Scientist, had encouraged their daughters to make their own decisions about faith. By the time Gabby reached young adulthood, she had fully embraced her Jewish background. She even had a formal naming ceremony in which she took the Hebrew name Gabriella, which means “God is my strength.”
She’d gone to Israel for the first time in 2001 and described the visit as “life-changing.” The journalists and politicians on the trip with her said she asked more questions than anyone, and she came away feeling a kinship with Israelis. She was especially taken with the Jewish concept of tzedakah, which speaks to our obligations to be charitable.
Though she cast her lot with the Jewish people, Gabby being Gabby, she remained curious and open-minded about other religions. She took a liking to the Catholic priest who was the chaplain of the U.S. House of Representatives. She wanted us to go to him for