Taylor turns up at Giffords’ farewell

WASHINGTON -- As colleagues honored Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., on her resignation from Congress on Wednesday, there was a familiar figure on the House floor: former Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Bay St. Louis.

“I just wanted to be there,” Taylor said. He was in Washington for a board meeting and to do consulting work when he learned the House was going to pay tribute to Giffords, who had been shot in the head a year ago by a man who killed six people in Tucson.

“She’s such a wonderful person. I was lucky enough to be there.

I know her very well. She was on the Armed Services Committee, really bright, inquisitive, asked the right questions,” said Taylor, who was also on the House Armed Services Committee.

Giffords is recovering from her wounds and said in a statement read by Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., she was resigning from Congress to concentrate on her health.

Taylor said he stood at the back of the House chamber on the Democratic side and waited until most members had greeted her after speeches and after she stepped up to the speaker’s chair on the dais and handed her resignation to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.

Giffords made her way down the center aisle toward the Democratic cloakroom when she saw Taylor.

“I hugged her,” he said. Asked if Giffords recognized her, Taylor said, “I know she did. You could see it in her eyes.”

Taylor said early in their acquaintance, she had come back from her district wearing a diamond ring and he asked her if she had gotten married. When she said “yes,” he wanted to know to whom and it became a joke between them because she first said a Navy man, then a flyer, then a flyer who was on loan to NASA. Eventually, Taylor said she told him, “he’s the captain of the space shuttle.” Gifford’s husband is astronaut Mark Kelly, whom Taylor began referring to as “the underachiever.”

On Wednesday, Taylor hugged Giffords and asked, “Is the underachiever taking good care of you?”

Giffords, who has trouble speaking, gave Taylor “a big smile.”

“It obviously triggered a smile,” he said.