One of the peculiar pleasures of my daily walks in my neighborhood is the way they coax my mind into untamed excursions, how they let my mind wander wildly and lead it to take trips that plumb the depths of dim and distant memories.
Today, as my steps carried me through familiar streets in my subdivision, my thoughts veered unexpectedly to a man I hadn’t seen in nearly two decades.
Eighteen years ago, in Chicago, I crossed paths with the man, though I can no longer recall how we met.
He was at least 15 years my senior and worked as a security guard, a job that, while outwardly unremarkable, had insidiously eroded his sense of self-worth.
He was a charming, kindhearted, complaisant gentleman, but he carried within him the heavy burden of a diminished self-concept.
He seemed to have internalized the indignities of his job — the curt, first-name directives from people young enough to be his children, the endless errands, the casual condescension from almost everyone — as confirmation of some imagined unworthiness.
He thought he was condemned to a life of perpetual servitude and wasn’t worthy of respect.
His resignation was haunting. He accepted his station without any hint of bitterness or self-righteous indignation, but with a quiet, tragic acquiescence.
It startled, even unsettled him, when I treated him with reverence. Being Nigerian myself and keenly aware of the deference Yoruba culture demands for one’s elders, I naturally addressed him with honorifics and bowed slightly when I greeted him since he was Yoruba.
He recoiled at this. “Just call me George,” he insisted, almost pleading. “Don’t say ‘sir’ to me. I’m not worthy. I’m just a security man.”
His words cut deep, but what truly unnerved me was his confession about his son.
The man’s only child, a college student, called him “dad,” as children do. Yet he described the experience as surreal, even disorienting. “I ask myself, ‘So I am somebody’s dad?’” he admitted.
The title, “dad,” felt like an ill-fitting garment, he said, a reminder of a dignity he could no longer inhabit.
The man had once harbored lofty dreams. His intellectual curiosity was admirable. He told me he was always fascinated with disciplines that ended in “-logy,” such as sociology, anthropology, criminology, etc.
Winning the Diversity Green Card Lottery had filled him with hope. The security job was supposed to be a stopgap, a stepping stone toward university and a career worthy of his mind.
But the stopgap stretched into permanence, and he found himself trapped, pouring every resource into his son’s education while his own aspirations withered.
His story has lingered with me because it’s a distressing example of what it means to lose oneself in the grind of immigrant survival, which we don’t talk enough about.
The silent erosion of dignity, the paralysis of untapped potential, the listless resignation to an unkind fate — these are wounds that rarely make their way into public discourse about “japa.”
And yet, they are endemic and gnaw at the edges of countless lives.
Today, moved by the sudden pull of memory, I searched for his name in my old phonebook and dialed the number I found. It was disconnected.
I wonder where the man is now—or if he is, in fact, alive.
The thought left me heavy with sadness, the kind that clings to you, demanding acknowledgment.
I’ve carried his story for years, and now I leave it here, not to find resolution but simply to lay it down. Some weights, after all, are best shared.