When I was a teenager, my mother married Mr. Heaton. I first met him as Mr. Heaton because he was a teacher in the elementary school that I used to believe would be a permanent fixture in my life, McGlone Elementary. It had been my elementary school, then my mother began teaching there. Through middle and much of high school, I would leave my school in Five Points and go back to McGlone, in Montebello. My Denver people who remember what the city was like in the ’80s and ’90s will understand the implications — well crafted frying pan, beautiful dancing fire. I never had Mr. Heaton as a teacher. My first memory of him was observing a one-sided argument in the hall in which another student was venting extraordinary rage at him, part of which was a series of racist remarks about all of the things that Mr. Heaton’s pasty white ass could never understand about what the student had to deal with. Mr. Heaton never stopped gazing at the student with openness and love, absorbing everything that the kid had to throw with stoic grace. It wasn’t hard to see, even then, that the student was venting all of his rage at Mr. Heaton because it was safe, probably the only safe place he had to express what was going on with him. Mr. Heaton let him finish, let him wear himself out. And, then he reminded his student that he was out of line, that he still needed to finish his assignments, and assured him that — despite everything he was certainly going through — there were now, and would always be, difficult things which were expected of him.
After the wedding, Mr. Heaton became Marty. I never really thought of him as my step dad, both because he was Mr. Heaton and because we only lived together for a very short time. But we grew close very quickly. I learned that the boy in that hall was a bit off base about what Marty could and couldn’t understand. The Heatons hadn’t been in the States for very many generations. I’m not sure exactly how long, and they’d spent most of that time in the heart of Detroit and South Chicago. There were certain things that Marty only talked about cryptically. The Troubles, or rather the events leading up to them, had something to do with the Heatons deciding to leave, or being pushed out of the Isle of Green. And the way that Marty talked about Martin Cahill, I’m not sure the man wasn’t his namesake. In the black neighborhood that I grew up in, it was assumed that all white people lived a gilded existence free from the torments of racism and the oppression of the state. They were beneficiaries of tyranny, never having to scrape by under its boot. But, while the hoses and dogs were turned on our civil rights activists in the Jim Crow south and COINTELPRO was busy bombing and sterilizing my family and their comrades in the north, the Black and Tans were rounding up Irish boys and throwing them in concentration camps to use as collateral, or as a punishment, or for whatever excuse they want to make up. Our families are not so different.
Marty, and the entire Heaton family, have been nothing but a boon to my life. Unfortunately, though, for the sake of getting to the point I’m getting to, I have to jump to an end. It is not the end. It is an end.
My mother walked into my printshop in the late summer of 2009 and told me that she needed to talk to me. We went for a walk. My mother is the definition of an Iowan. As soon as we were out of earshot of my partners, she told me that Marty had been diagnosed with cancer. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Iowans, leaving the shop wasn’t a matter of secrecy and cutting to the chase isn’t a matter of callousness. In the words of Dar Williams, “We don’t like to make our passions other people’s concern”. I responded matter-of-factly that people beat cancer all or the time now. My mother only had to look at me to communicate that this wasn’t that kind of cancer.
Marty made it through the winter. We had some good times, watched some of his favorite movies, shared some meals. But, on chemo, he quickly went from being a giant of a man to a quietly living memory of a giant.
In life, Marty had wasted no time. He was not only a teacher, he was a lead organizer in the teachers union (not the contemporary teachers union, which is … you know what, later). Marty, and my mother, were among the leaders of the great teachers strike of 1994. Admittedly, that strike failed. And, in the wake of that failure, the district fired not only every strike leader they could but many of the people who really knew what it meant to be teachers. Since that time, the entire district has been weak. Most teachers are just kids themselves. And, there’s been no one to push back against anti-education corporate interest groups that have usurped what little hope was left in the schooling system.
I digress.
Marty didn’t waste time. During the summers, he worked the same job he’d first picked up when he moved to Denver, laying asphalt and striping parking lots with Colorado Asphalt Services Inc., CASI. CASI was also my first job. Solid guys, lotta love there. On holidays, he unloaded UPS planes at DIA. He was also incredibly active with the church, kept track of his extended family, and knew the names and stories of more hundreds of children than I can fathom.
On the day that Marty died, he accidentally locked himself out of the house. He didn’t want to inconvenience anyone, so he climbed to the second story bedroom window, broke in, and went gracefully and permanently to sleep.
My grandmother and my aunt brought my mom and a handful of photos to my print shop a few days later to design and print funeral programs. I remember asking them how many we would need, “… one hundred, two hundred?” My mother shook her head, “I don’t think that’s going to be enough,” she told me. “Sure.” I printed some number of hundreds.
In the morning, before the funeral, back in the living room of so many Christmases and birthdays, I sat and watched a series of community delegates who had come to see my mother before the ceremony. An emissary from the Teamsters came and all but kneeled in front of my mother. He whispered reverent words and took his leave. He was followed by a teacher, and other representatives of organizations concerned for my mother’s wellbeing. The procession ended, we loaded into a town car, and hung our heads through town and into the church. The church filled in behind us. Then it crowded at the back. It took a lot out of me not to crumble when my little brother spoke. He was barely an adolescent. Marty was his lodestone. I looked around the sea of drowning eyes and saw many familiar and unfamiliar faces. There was a small army of strong and weather worn men, scholarly and nurturing educators, and so many young people who’d leaned on Marty when nothing else was stable. There was scarcely any room where one could see a wall or the floor. The family was led back out, returning to the town car to go to the cemetery, and that was when I knew the impact of a life well lived. The whole block was full of mourners. It wasn’t a small church, but most of the people who’d come had never managed to get in. From the doors to the street the crowd was just as thick as it had been inside. I saw teachers from every school I’d been to, kids I’d fought with in the streets of Montebello, and so many others who’d been reached by the simple work of a man who never stopped giving.
Going back a little ways to that teachers strike, my mother had been very vocal. Not only during the strike, but before. She’d made influential enemies with the corporate shills who run the school board and after the failed strike she had to take her skills elsewhere. She’d been working for social services, which owed her more than a few favors — always will if we’re being honest. After the funeral, she took it upon herself to write out a job description for a new position, as a driver. In the social services system there are many foster homes that house more than a normal household’s worth of children. These foster parents often get a bad wrap, but the truth is that without them we’d have to give the whole operation back to the Vatican. Yes, even here in Colorado, the Roman Catholic Church took care of all orphans not very long ago — and might again if the secular authority continues to botch the job. With eight or nine mostly unrelated foster kids in one house (all going through a unique bouquet of traumas), extracurricular activities are usually out of the question. My mother decided that she was going to change that and drive as many kids in the foster system to whatever activities they chose to attend as she could. And she told social services that they were going to pay for it. Failed strike campaign aside, it is very difficult to tell my mother ‘no’ — even if she’s not your mother. Social services gave her the job, the job that allowed her to just show up, give kids headphones, and drive, a job she invented.
Marty dedicated himself to a career of undervalued work and set up three union-backed retirement accounts. My mother needed to grieve, so she created a job that allowed her to drive for 200 miles a day and continue the work that she and Marty had dedicated themselves to — moving the needle just a little for kids that society has already decided are human waste.
Fast forward six or seven years. My little sister is working as a social worker. She’s in charge of distributing staple resources to struggling mothers. It’s important work, but there are a lot of people who can do it. She was also a student of the great dancer Cleo Parker Robinson, and of our mom. And, as a social worker, she was staring at the climbing rates of suicide in young, black, high-achieving girls. For clarity, for girls in black communities, the higher your GPA, the more likely you are to commit suicide. And not by a little bit, by a lot. I don’t know if that’s true of any other demographic. You’d have to ask my sister. My sister decided to take what she knew from community organizing, from watching my mother educate, from the church, from her expertise as a social worker, and as a classically trained performer, and she founded an institution that prevents suicide for girls in exactly that situation.
Write Your Own Job Description
Write yourself a job description. Write your own job description because you are going to die. And it is what you do between now and then that determines whether or not you will fulfill the obligations you have to others. And you are obligated. No amount of development of personal or collective sovereignty will ever circumvent the fact that you have both inherent and self-created obligations. But! You can write your own job description. You can design the method you will use to approach the things that you must do. So, write your own job description because every moment that you haven’t is a moment in which you may not even know what interests you’re serving. Write your own job description because that is your job. Because it is your job to become fully human, fully an agent in your own life. That’s what maturity is. Write your own job description metaphorically and literally. At work, at home, and in your relationships. Figure out what it is that you are and are not for. Write it down. Crumple it up. Throw it away. Act in accordance with your best understanding right now, learn that you were wrong, and start over. Write your own job description. Fail. Then write it again. Just know one thing: this is the only exercise in this book that you can’t avoid. Because whatever you do after it has been pointed out that whatever you do is up to you, that’s on you. So, write your job description already. The rest of this chapter is just about the mechanics of committing to it.
This chapter is outlined in detail, though the prose is incomplete. But it is my job to complete it, and the rest of this book, or die trying. If you’d like to stay up to date with this project, you can sign up for the mailing list here.
Be good to each other.