Almost Nothing in Common

May 2019

How good a job is cashier in an orphanage?

I wouldn't have thought to answer that question except recently my wife's brother Lloyd was in Toronto for his annual visit having flown in from India.

It's not that Lloyd lives in India. He was there because he is, more or less, always travelling. He doesn't have a home of his own. He had one  in the past but not now.

Lloyd has two home bases. My address is his Canadian residence so he can avail himself of a health card and a driver's licence. He sees his doctor when he's here.

He also stays for weeks at a time with his girlfriend, Varda, at her rented house. She is an astrophysics professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in California. That's near the Hearst Castle. They travel and hike together quite a bit. For example after Toronto Lloyd and Varda were going to meet up in Heidelberg, Germany for a month where she would be doing research. From there Lloyd will be off to Corfu to relax for a few weeks. I'm not exactly sure what he'll be relaxing from.

Lloyd is parsimonious so money is not an issue. He inherited some money. (Here's a pro tip. You want your parents to die owning a house in Vancouver.) Varda's research, paid for by grants, takes her to interesting places three or four times a year. And Lloyd joins her. As well he can poll his network to find a house sitting gig wherever he's going without Varda. Consequently Lloyd is able to live on not much.

A little more background. Lloyd started travelling in 1972 when he left Vancouver to do pre med at Hebrew U in Jerusalem. But wires were crossed. There was no English pre med program so Lloyd dropped out and started travelling. He went to India. It was all the rage at the time. I had been there the year before.

In India Lloyd became a member of the Rajneeshi ashram in Pune. The Rajneesh was the guy with the 92 Rolls Royces preaching a hedonistic life style. Lots of controversy in India first, and then Oregon where the group moved in the 80s before being booted back to India. There's a documentary about it on Netflix.

Lloyd learned to be a fine carpenter at the ashram, an avocation that sometimes gets him invited, via his network, to jobs entailing more travelling. He once worked on a half million dollar kitchen in Denver. And he built a deck for Margie and I during one of his Toronto pass thrus.

The network that Lloyd uses for house sitting and carpentry work is the Sannyasins, disciples of the Rajneesh, now spread around the world.

One thing about the Sannyasin Diaspora is they dance a lot. That's how Lloyd and Varda met and there are dances regularly around the world which have brought in a many new disciples. Varda is twenty five years younger than Lloyd and was never at the original ashram.

So when Lloyd arrived in Toronto last month from India and told us that he recently had been working as a cashier at an orphanage we were only partly surprised. Arriving from anywhere is no big deal with Lloyd. Last year he flew in from Germany where he was visiting his two step-grandchildren. He was married for awhile.

It was his work at the orphanage that had us asking questions. Most people don't think of cash registers and orphans in the same thought bubble. But in this case the guest house where Lloyd stayed was near an orphanage and the guest house had a cafeteria run by a friend.  So Lloyd was doing shifts on the cash register to pass some time and older orphans were earning an unfair days wage working in the cafeteria. Ah India.

Lloyd and I had a conversation about the fun of cashiering. I had been a cashier for several years while in university. We both see a certain something in the job.

It was my all time favourite job and it's something I'd like to do even now in my semi-retirement if a cashier job where I could sit landed in my lap.

The great thing about me as a cashier was that I was able to develop a brief relationship with almost every person as they were paying. “Hi. How are you doing today?” was an easy way to start a conversation that was destined to end before a reason for conflict would surface. I liked that.

So Lloyd and I have a lot in common. We've both been in Afghanistan, Nepal and India on the cheap and like to talk about it. We both like cashiering and his sister is my wife.

And we have our differences. I have a home. He doesn't. I travel a bit on $250 dollars a day. He travels almost all the time at little cost. He dances. I don't.

I think I should dance more.

June 14, 2019