I Almost Didn’t Take Elvis to Scarborough

I almost didn’t take Elvis to Scarborough.

When I accepted his Uber request, I thought I was signing up for a short trip, maybe ten minutes. By the time I got there, he’d changed the destination. Ten minutes had become about 45, and I wasn’t particularly interested in making the drive.

Then we started talking.

He seemed like a good kid. I decided I’d take him.

I’m glad I did.

Elvis came to Canada from Ghana when he was about 17. By then, Canada had already been part of his family’s story for years.

His mother had left Ghana when he was around ten years old. The plan was one I’ve heard from other immigrant families before. One parent comes first, gets established, finds work and builds enough of a foundation to eventually bring the children over.

In Elvis’s family, that parent was his mother.

She came to Canada and worked as a personal support worker. Elvis stayed behind in Ghana with his father and younger brother.

What was supposed to eventually bring the family together meant years apart first.

About seven of them.

“It was tough,” he told me.

He didn’t dramatize it. He didn’t need to. A ten-year-old boy spending most of the next seven years without his mother tells you enough.

His father did what he could, Elvis said. Life in Ghana could be difficult, but he was also careful about how he described the country where he grew up.

Ghana isn’t a place where no one can succeed. People build lives there. People make money there. Just as importantly, he pointed out that there are people in Canada who struggle despite all the advantages this country offers.

The difference, as he sees it, is opportunity.

There are simply more opportunities here.

Eventually, his mother’s years of work paid off and the family was able to reunite in Canada.

Elvis finished school and went to work at Honda. Factory work could have become his life. Instead, he decided it wasn’t the life he wanted.

“I can’t stay in the factory,” he told me. “I have to do something.”

So he’s back in school, studying HVAC.

I liked that answer.

A factory job can disappear because somebody in a boardroom decides to cut production. A trade belongs to you. Learn how to install and repair heating and air-conditioning systems and you’ve got something you can carry from employer to employer, city to city, or eventually into a business of your own.

And that’s exactly where Elvis’s thinking is already going.

There are four friends.

Two are getting into plumbing. Elvis is learning HVAC. Another is looking at construction work, possibly drywall. They’re already talking about what those skills could become if they put them together.

Maybe one day they build a contracting company.

They’re young, so who knows where it goes. Maybe the business happens. Maybe their lives take them in completely different directions.

But I loved hearing them think about it.

They aren’t waiting around for somebody to construct their futures for them. They’re learning things they can use and beginning to imagine what they might build with them.

The rest of Elvis’s family is doing much the same.

His older sister is studying nursing. His younger brother is 14 and still in school. His mother, after spending years establishing the family here, is planning a move to Barrie.

She also hasn’t been back to Ghana in roughly 11 years.

That’s about to change.

The family is planning to return, connected to his sister’s wedding. For his mother, it will mean going back to the country she left more than a decade ago to begin the long process of building another life for her children.

Elvis hasn’t been back since coming to Canada either.

Listening to him, though, I never got the sense that his story required choosing between the two countries.

He talked about eventually starting a business in Ghana and perhaps travelling back and forth. Canada is where he’s building his life, but Ghana remains part of who he is and part of the future he imagines.

Somewhere during that drive to Scarborough, I told him that what he was describing sounded to me like the Canadian dream.

Not because everything had been easy.

It clearly hadn’t been.

His mother spent years away from her children. His father raised them back home. Elvis arrived here as a teenager and had to figure out where he fit. He worked in a factory, decided that wasn’t enough for the future he wanted and went back to school.

Now he’s learning a trade.

His sister is becoming a nurse.

His younger brother is growing up here.

His mother spent more than a decade doing the work that made all of it possible.

And four young friends are sitting around talking about how plumbing, HVAC and construction skills might someday become their own company.

That’s a pretty good Canadian story.

Eventually we reached Scarborough, and Elvis got out of the car.

Had I simply looked at the changed destination when I arrived and said no, I would’ve driven away and never known any of it.

There are millions of stories like his moving around this country every day. Most of us encounter them without knowing they’re there. Someone sits beside us on the bus, works next to us, serves our coffee, fixes our furnace or gets into the back seat of our car.

We see where they’re going.

Every once in a while, if we’re lucky, we find out how they got here.

Journeys | The Canadianist