Father's dreams; Son's reality? Part I

Driving from Queretaro back to Zacatecas, one night in September 2007, the highway dark, the conversation surprising...  I was thinking about what Hector Robles, José "Montaña"'s friend and "teacher", said to me "out of the blue" the prior day upon being introduced.  "You are more honorable, more intelligent than your father..."  We had just been introduced and he just started spitting things out at me.  He didn't let me get a word in.  Not a "hi, nice to meet you...  What did you say you do?" Not a "How long do you and José know each other?..."  No.  He just kept spitting things out... He said, "but you've gotta check your temper...  you're very angry... you've gotta learn to relax... Look at you! Check your temper boy.  You're too angry.  You've gotta learn to forgive, to let go or you're gonna enfermar, get sick..."  Yeah, look at me, you just said something a normal person wouldn't say beginning a conversation with someone they just met, you don't let me even ask why you said that, and you think I should be happy and relaxed?  More honorable, more intelligent than my father? 

My father the opthalmologist who saved that girl's sight on mischief night...  My father who wanted his practice on an indian reserve.  My father who was the valedictorian of his Brooklyn College graduating class, who walked out on a Fellowship to Purdue University to marry my mom... 

Who was speaking for Hector, putting words in his mouth?  Who was telling him these things?  It certainly wasn't my father.  But wasn't it my father who was looking after me, who was travelling with me?  

19 years back, in 1988, a psychic told my mother that my father and my grandfather were watching over me, protecting me. She didn't say it straight forward.  She said, "there's a man here with us.  He says he was with your son the other night when he tried to take his life.  His name begins with A.  He says it's not your son's time. He's got some important things yet to do in this lifetime. It will take a while for him to recover from this.  But he will be fine.  Do you know who that person could be?" and on the tape is heard my mother saying, "My deceased husband's name is Alan." and the psychic says, "There's another person who was with your son that night.  His name begins with an H.  Do you know him?"  And my mother says that her father's name is Harry. 

 Earlier that week, José "Montaña", said to me, "A spirit just visited you.  She swooped down, circled you, stood still and then left.  Do you know her?"  I said, "I don't know who that could be... No."  My cousin Stacy died of a brain tumor when she was 16-years-old.  I was 9.  She was my salvation at her father's house.  She was loving and affectionate towards me in a house where I felt unwelcome, like an imposter; a house with terrible memories... 

José Montaña has a large Asian Indian bazaar and sells Indian crafts, furniture, clothing, literature, chimes, incense and crystals in the state fairs.  His family is one of the first Krishna families in Mexico, his older brothers being introduced to Krishna over 30 years ago in Mexico City.  José isn't a Krishna, although he is vegetarian over 3 years (for health reasons, although he eats a ton of cheese and yogurt, potato chips and soda) and has been to India.  One of his older brothers started an Indian importation business in Mexico City and José and his wife Mary began selling the Indian crafts in the fairs 20 years ago out of Guadalajara.   José's house has a small temple/shrine to Ganesh and hosts visiting Maharreshi during Krishna gatherings and courses.  For many of these Mexican families, Krishna was an avenue towards the middle-class.  Most of their children became fluent in English, many travelling to the U.S., Canada and India.  In fact, José's oldest son studied at the university in Texas and married an "American" woman there...(she will be part of my writing "neither here; nor there).   José is a very large Mexican man with a prominent stomach, easily standing over 6 feet tall. His friends call him José Hindú or José Bhudda for his prominent stomach.  I nicknamed him José "Montaña" because he is a mountain of a man; the first and only nickname I've ever given anyone in my life...  José has eye problems.  When we first met, he was in the process of a series of lazer surgeries on his corneas.  3 years later, he's still in that process.  So, he sees things differently than others and he looks at you strangely with a cloudy look.  It's as if he has a film over his eyes.

Roof Patio at José Montañas "Castle" in Guadalajara, my birthday June 20th, 2009

That same day while bidding us good-night, José said, "Another one just visited you.  But this time he didn't spend as much time."  The following day José came up to me and said, "I was thinking about you last night.  The second spirit who visited you yesterday was bald and had a wide back.  Do you know who that could be?"  And I said, "who knows? It could be my grandfather.  He was bald."  But, truthfully, why would a spirit have an appearance?  I've thought much about this much over the years.  Spirits don't have a gender.  Spirit is your true essence; it preceeds and superceeds your body.  Gender is biological.  The spirit?  If someone sees spirits or ghosts or phantasms, whatever you wish to call them, the appearance of those entities is specific to that person...  For the experience to have sentido, to offer the desired affect, the person being visited must understand "who" it is visiting them.  It's kind of like in the Robin Williams film, "What Dreams May Come"; in "heaven" his children appear in the form of people they wished they could have been in life...  By not appearing to Robin as the people whom he knew in life, they caused less stress and confusion  as guides for finding his wife (their mother) who had just committed suicide and is condemned to Purgatory...



More honorable, more intelligent than my father


My father, the unattainable goal.  Yo, Ross, the unaccomplishment...  


Thinking about these things and watching the white line in the middle of the road, watching the bugs appear in the beams of my headlights, watching the stars in the sky over Guanajuato, Jalisco, Aguascalientes.... hoping for one of the many shooting stars we see in the desert skies of Mexico, I wish you were, I wish you might... Margarita said, "You are continuing the work your father left off... "  I was taken aback.  Her comment had cut through my meditative silence.  At the time, Margarita didn't have the tendency to say things related to the metaphysical.  She had been a quiet skeptic, much like her mother, although, in the ranch the people believe in many things one would consider heresy or off the wall, such as curing for fright or being startled causing illnesses they call "fright" (espanto)...  They hire the local medicine woman/shaman for this ailment, and not the local doctor; the belief in winged snakes, in chupacabras and Nahualis (human shape shifters); the evil eye...

Wilfrido 5yrs, Benigno 2, Nicolas 7

My brother-in-law Wilfrido was cured for "Espanto" when he was a child... Truthfully, he never fully recovered.  Was it truly a snake he stumbled across?  or was it  the combination of being picked on by his older brothers and malnutricion?  He was five-years-old. Supposedly he was still breast-feeding...  They found him standing stock still in the middle of the forrest stairing at the ground...  Supposedly he had seen a snake.  I offer my in-laws my reasoning based upon a lot of reading and they ignore me. Willy lacks muscle tone, no matter how many push-ups and sit ups he does, he has significant neurological issues (difficulty concentrating, organizing his thoughts... he often seems like that cat with his tail plugged into the socket.  In fact, he has a tendency towards electricuting himself slightly.), and he doesn't learn.  He has significant mental organization problems and has poor memory retention.  When he was a child, he had a tendency towards eating dirt.  In the malnutricion literature I came across iron deficiency in children leading towards the eating of dirt and towards neurological disorders.  Muscles don't develop adecquate muscle tone when nerve impulses are eratic...


I asked Margarita to repeat herself.  She said, "What you are doing with my father, with my brothers...  Your father couldn't fulfill his dream of helping your grandfather, of working with Indigenous people...  You came to Mexico.  You decided to dedicate your life with me to creating a market for my father's coffee, to teaching my brother's to ask more from themselves, to offer more...  You brought books and ideas... you argued with them.  You forced them to think, to speak clearly, with confidence." And I asked her, "Do you really believe that?"  I had always believed they felt unwelcome my ideas and exigencias (suggestive pressuring).  "It's very difficult for us to accept our limitations and  receive outside criticism or criticism at all.  We throw tantrums and go kicking.  We are very slow changers. "
  
I was in line for the annual school check-up at the nurse's office...  I imagine I was in 6th grade, had just entered Branchburg Central Middle School.  No one paid positive attention towards me.  No one was interested in me.  However, when the nurse read my name she exclaimed, "I knew your father.  He was a great man.  The best doctor in his field.  He saved a girl's sight when all other doctors said she would go blind..."  I didn't understand.  She must be mistaking him for someone else.  My father was dead 6 years.  I guess she noticed the confusion on my face and continued, "What a tragedy to have lost such a great doctor.  I was his assistant at his practice in Somerville at the time. One mischief night while a girl was riding her bike down the street, a car full of young men passed her; one of the passengers lanced an egg at her, hitting her in the eye.  The girl's parents took her to your father for another opinion, since the other doctors said there was nothing they could do to save her sight.  Your father had a different opinion and operated on her and saved her eye. What a shame to lose such a wonderful man..."

My father met my mother when he was graduating college.  She grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, near the Verazano Narrows Bridge that crosses to Brooklyn from Staten Island.  Where he grew up, I have no idea.  I never had a conversation with him.  I was too young when he died.  She was 16-years-old, but lied about her age; said she was 18.  He was 5 years her senior...  The truth is that it was her friend who had discovered him.  But, my mother stole him away from her.  She was desperate to leave the neighborhood, the situation of caring for her younger brother Henry, for her alcoholic father... her father's crazy girlfriends; their crazy children...  This was her oportunity, her out.  The problem was that Alan, my father, was offered a Fellowship to Purdue University to study Animal Husbandry or Invertebrate Zoology...  He was due to leave at the end of Summer. Purdue  University was one of the top schools in agriculture and animal sciences being in the mid-west.  My grandfather, I never knew because he died when I was 1-year-old, had raised his two sons to become doctors.  Ever since his wife died, leaving  him alone with two young boys, Alan's father literally beat into his sons the idea of study and medical school.  My mother told me that after the death of his wife, her father-in-law didn't date, he didn't go out after work.  He dedicated all his free time to raising his two sons.  He was a blue-collar worker, son of immigrants and felt there was no option for his sons other than to accomplish what he couldn't accomplish for himself.  It was an opportunity not to be disreguarded...  However, my father had ideas of his own.  He never wanted to be a doctor.  When he met my mother and fell in-love with her, those ideas changed; he decided that maybe his father had a point.  During the first few weeks of his Fellowship at Purdue, a thought nagged him constantly, "I want to marry Marsha.  I want to raise her children.  How the hell will I do that on a biologist's salary?"  The response was what his father tried beating into him and his older brother Stan for years; to become a doctor.  So, he walked out on the fellowship and returned to New York City.


The problem is that walking out on one of the world's most important academic "gifts" is the worst thing you can do if you plan on being accepted into medical school .  There was no doubt about Alan's academic merits.  The doubt was in whether he had all his marbles...  "What type of student walks out on a Fellowship?"  If I'm correct, Fellowships pay 4 years of schooling and offer stypends...  One by one Alan was rejected by the U.S. medical schools.  He and my mom married and worked two years until he was accepted by Bolognia University in Italy, the oldest university in the world.  They lived there 3 years.  He studying in Italian (he had studied Latin in college).  My mother pregnant and then giving birth to my older sister Sheri and spending time with other wives of U.S. students in Bologna, didn't learn the language....


Supposedly one of my father's fantasies was having his practice on an Indian reservation in the mid-west.  My mother wouldn't have had it that way.  After 20 years of suffering in a working-class family and watching her father drown his sorrows in Whisky, she had finally gained the "American Dream".  In her fantasies, she would have 3 children and adopt 3; an Asian, an African-American and..."  They did end up in the mid-west, in Missouri where my younger sister Beth was born, where he did his Residency.  I was born in Philadelphia where my father did his internship and where his brother-in-law and young disciple, Henry would go to medical school; Temple University.  After my father and mother returned from Italy, he was immediately accepted into Albany Medical School.  16 years later, my other sister Sheri enrolled in SUNY Albany...  I'm sure trying to retrace her father's and her early footsteps.  It was there that she would have her first epileptic seizures...  Sometimes returning to a sad past isn't such a healthy decision...


During the interview of my uncle in his apartment on West 83rd street in 1991, Henry explained to me that my father had been his mentor.  Henry trailed behind Alan like a puppy.  Alan shared with Henry his love for medicine, science, technology, sports....  They rode the subways together and talked about what would later on be some of Henry's passions.  Henry was 11-years-old when my father came into his and my mother's lives.  At the time, my grandfather had a small trucking business.  During the 1960s in New York City, the Italian mafia controlled the trucking industry and paid visits to my grandfather's apartment;  I believe he had moved from Bay Ridge to Rego Park, Queens, near Flushing...  Henry remembers seeing his father crying, prostrated at the feet of those mafiosos...  "It's horrible seeing a grown man cry like a baby.  It's worse when it's your father... and there is nothing you can do."  When Alan opened his practice in Somerville, NJ 12 years later, there was much talk about my grandfather moving in with us, and my father teaching Harry how to grind lenses.  There wasn't time to waste.  Supposedly my grandfather was very content with the idea.  And then Alan became ill suddenly and died less than a year later.  The "American Dream"...  The house in the suburbs...  The 6 children; 3 of them adopted...? Saving my Grandfather from the mafia; giving him another chance...  Shattered.  Shattered was much more than an American Dream.

Beautiful young boy, porcelain doll, dropped from a fifth floor window, little girl playing motherhood, suddenly grew up too fast, realized she didn't want that doll no more... Daddy, a photograph in a photo album, 

a framed photograph on a night table, a vague memory of too little time spent together, one day a hero a savior, the following day a ghost. Beautiful young boy, porcelain doll shattered upon the sidewalk below. No one sees her drop it out the window.  No one asks the little girl about her doll.   The landlady opens the door to the street below.  Sees the fragments scattered infront of her stoop.  Looks upwards towards the open window above... Shakes her head.  She doesn't know. Enters her house.  Returns with a broom.  and sweeps the pieces of Young boy, porcelain doll into the gutter with all the memories of his beauty.

My uncle Henry told me, "Your father was supposed to save my father.  He was my inspiration and the reason I worked so hard in college and went to Medical School.  All our hopes were shattered when he died...."  Henry told me below the beam of light produced by the hanging lamp over the bar, "It's the rage I feel everytime I see my father crying infront of those men and think about your father disappearing so suddenly that pushes me towards the finish line in the marathons.  But, in as much as I run, that rage doesn't dissipate.  I tried to save my father, but he died before I had the chance..."


Harry had a fear of hospitals.  In February 1983, at the age of 72, Harry suffered a small heart attack on the job.  He was rushed to the hospital and examined by a heart specialist who said, "you are healthy.  It was just a minor one... You have easily another 10 years."  My grandfather was ready to walk out and return to the job.  But the doctor said, "we need you to remain here 2 days for more exams..."  Hearing those words, grandpa suffered a second attack.  This time it was a massive one.   My mother mentioned to me that he must have really loved me, because he visited me at Sloan Kettering Cancer Hospital a few weeks earlier.

I'm sorry.  I don't have many memories of interacting with you grandpa.  I just remember waiting for your gifts, eating bagels with cream cheese and belly lox in your apartment overlooking the East River, your balcony looking out towards the Bronx from Whitestone, Queens, hearing my mother or Aunt Annabel tell you that you couldn't have another drink at the annual family father's day softball game behind our house on Old York Road (it was my birthday, but the gathering was for father's day, for a father who had died years earlier leaving behind a son to celebrate his death and not his birthday) and listening to you speak with Uncle Henry and Mary Beth's cat when they lived in the basement apartment of the brownstone on West 83rd street, between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue.  You calling the cat by it's Yiddish name, "Scha, Scha"... whispering at him.  From you, I learned the love of cats and the love of talking to them.  You took us to Jones Beach in Long Island.  You took us apple picking in Duchess County, Upstate New York. But I don't recall having a conversation with you.  I'm sorry.

I would later see my grandfather in a photograph in my mother-in-law's kitchen.  The night before, I entered Margarita and my bedroom in Xalapa.  I was annoyed and exclaimed to Margarita, "If someone is here with me, I want them to show themself!  I want to know what the hell is the purpose!"  Margarita looked at me as if I were crazy; as if I were wishing to be schizophrenic.  I never saw anything in my life.  I hardly even had nightmares, which is why I remember so vividly the Mudman...  Last night, after writing this, when the house was dark and silent, I walked outside to relax, to cool off, to think, to look at the stars...  I thought about that nightmare over 36 years ago and realized that the mudman was my father, the dog was the only dog we ever had. I was between my father and the dog.  I don't remember having a dog.  Sheri says it was her dog.  We were living in Martinsville, the year between moving from Missouri to Old York Road in Branchburg.  My mother says that my father was horribly irritable due to his illness and didn't have patience for the dog.  One evening he packed the dog into his car and made it disappear.  After his death, my mother didn't allow dogs in the house.  I don't understand the dream.  I don't understand it's significance other than a young boy wishing to be with his father and his dog...  the brown specks of dust swirled and densened and evolved into a pointilist painting mud colored.  A man with his young son and dog behind their house in Martinsville, a small stream dividing the yards.  A buzzing intensifying with their approach.  The feeling of a painful hollowness.  Was the mudman taking away that boy?  Is that why he screamed for his mother?  The hall light was on, the bedroom door was open.  But the three continued approaching...  


When José Montaña told me that he sees spirits and even speaks with them and helps them descansar (rest), I said, fine...  You see phantasms or spirits...  I don't.  I hoped he did.  But I couldn't understand what was the purpose for one person to see them and others to not see them.  I was annoyed by Hector Robles.  His lack of desire to actually speak with me had me feeling that he was playing with me.  But how could he know the reputation of my father and what that meant for me?  How could he tell me that I could improve on my father?  I hoped that José was being honest and not inventing things.  But how can you know?  I can't see with his eyes.  If I don't see the phantasms, I don't see the phantasms.  


The following day Margarita and I made a day trip to her parents' ranch. I was camera happy that day looking for good photos to put on the website Chris was constructing for us. I was in my mother-in-law's kitchen preparing to leave for the market with Margarita and her three younger sisters and was walking out the door when something told me to turn around and take photos of the kitchen.  The smoke rising from the bracero (a wooden or brick platform used as an open wood stove) passing through the beams of light from the ventilation holes above created an incredibly beautiful ambience...  I took many photos and left totally in-love with the kitchen.  Margarita and I returned to Xalapa and I went straight to the computer to see how the photos came out. What I hadn't seen looking at the small screen on my digital camera appeared clearly on the computer.  I called Margarita to look at the photo and asked, "do you have an idea who this is?"  She disappeared and returned with my photo album of childhood pictures...  This is what she showed me:  I'm on the left, my cousin Craig is in the middle.  My grandfather is on the right.  The following photo is what was on my camera:

But where was my father?  I never imagined it was my grandfather... who was with me.  José wasn't inventing. Why he and how he sees spirits or phantasms is beyond me.  All I know is that someone is speaking with me... My grandfather was born on January 24th, 1911.  Margarita's mother Paz was born on January 24th, 1955.  My younger sister Beth was born on March 12th.  Paz's younger brother Gregorio was born on March 12th.  Margarita's younger brother Gregorio was born on April 26th. My older sister Sheri was born on April 26th...  How many coincidences must exist before they cease being coincidences?


For some reason I understood everything Margarita told me about herself and her family when we first met in February 2003.  She says that I didn't speak a word of Spanish.  I walked around with a college level Spanish/English dictionary in my hand and struggled to tell her what was on my mind and in my heart.  When we first met, she kissed me on the cheek.  Weeks later she told me that she had been waiting for me ever since Michael had told her he had a friend in New York City who was a great cook and that he hoped would end up on the ranch, Las Cañadashttp://www.bosquedeniebla.com.mx/, where she worked.  She said, during a "festival of the planting of Maiz (Corn)" she had a peyote (called medicine) induced dream where she is in a very big city with very tall buildings.  She is in a circular kitchen and is speaking with someone nearby saying, "Open the windows.  He prefers the windows open while he is cooking..."  I don't like kitchens without windows.  I prefer a window I can look out of while chopping vegetables etc.  I prefer that window open. One of the problems we have had in the past is that she doesn't believe in sleeping with the windows open.  Because I have a strange asthma problem, I prefer sleeping with cool air.  It seems that I breathe more easily with cool air.  Warm air feels thick, doesn't enter the lungs easily.  


At this moment a memory entered my mind of the first place I remember suffering this air problem while trying to sleep.  It was in my cousin's bedroom in Cranford, NJ when my father was in the hospital.  The air was hot.  I pressed my face against the wall.  The wall cooled the air and made it easier to sleep. I awakened the following day to wet sheets...  I remember my sitting on the floor, playing with my cousin's toys.  My aunt Esta entered the room wearing a very short robe.  She reprimanded me for wetting the bed, for leaving the toys scattered around the room.  She bent over infront of me showing a triangle of red pubic hair...  She wasn't wearing anything below.  I was 4-years-old...  Why would I remember that?


My father beat the crap out of you when Uncle Alan was in the hospital.  He beat you for wetting the bed.  He beat you for teasing Satch...  I didn't remember that...  


When I told Margarita that my father died on New Years Eve, 1973, she cried and said something I didn't understand...  I didn't understand why she would cry for my father dying 28 years earlier.  Since his death I had passed exactly 4 cycles of 7 years.  Each cycle is a cycle of dramatic change.  My second cycle ended with my suicide.  My fourth cycle was my time living in New York City.  When the 5th cycle ended here in Mexico, I began drawing again after a 7 year hiatus in an attempt to construct a stable life with Margarita.  I was also told by Immigration that my struggle with them was at it's end and that I would become a permanent resident the following year; the year that begins the new cycle.  However, in this new cycle has come a national security crises unheard of...  A violence seeping throughout the country that scares us into wanting to crawl into a hole. 


When I asked Margarita again why she was crying, she explained that her father's older brother Simone also died on New Years Eve.  He was an alcoholic and was beaten to death in the street... 


What my Grandfather experienced and my Uncle Henry witnessed, we hear about every day. 
The Zetas enter your establishment and offer you protection. Protection from who?  They tell you that if you don't pay their fee, they will appear the following day and bust up the joint or your head.  Or that they know where your children go to school, where you live, your wife's schedule. This became noticeable in the Port of Veracruz when we were deciding upon opening up a cafe/bakery or going on the road with a coffee bar in early 2007.  We opted for risking the road trips.  Everything was pretty much tranquil until 2010.  The problems became noticable in certain states the year earlier, such as Zacatecas and Michoacan.  But, it didn't affect us.  However, over the past year and a half the delincuency has spread like an epidemic throughout the country. Thinking about what my grandfather experienced I wonder if I'm supposed to know what he knew...  The problem is that it is much more dangerous here... and things move much more quickly.          


One could say that my grandfather's alcoholism was fed by his guilt of having seen his younger brother hit by a car.  Supposedly he held himself responsible for his brother's death.  Later on, his young wife would die of gangrene in a mental hospital.  Gangrene in a mental hospital?  Who was doing the surgery on what? 


My mother was 15-years-old when her mother died.  She had been caring for her father and her younger brother 5 years since her mother was institutionalized for schizophrenia.  Henry said that he didn't begin talking until he was 5-years-old.  My mother says that her mother gave Henry cigarrettes at that age.  My grandfather told my grandmother to clean the house (in Bay Ridge) and my grandmother stuck the garden hose through the window and did a thorough washing... My mother's mother, Harry's wife, was the 12th child of 12 children of immigrant Jewish parents.  Margarita is the 3rd child of 12 children of poor Mexican coffee farmers...


I was a monkey in the middle...

Roberto sifting soil with his grandchildren

When we first met in Huatusco, Veracruz February 2003, Margarita's father's annual (yearly) crop sold for the equivalent of $1,500.  To make ends meet, the sons left for Mexico City to work in construction.  While selling cupcakes and Roberto's coffee in Los Lagos (the Lakes) in Xalapa, I asked my brother-in-laws one by one, "do you plan on following your father's footsteps in the cultivation of coffee?"  One by one they responded, "Not on your life."  But, what were they going to do with their lives?  And I exclaimed, "but this is your blood, this earth.  If we could find a way of marketing your father's coffee, we could create hope for your children and your neices and nephews.  I have the high quality baked goods that match the high quality of your father's coffee. We just need people enthusiastic about creating and working this project... I can create and manage the project.  I just need the money and the people." They rejected my idea 3 years, until Chris Brown appeared... 

 

Los Lagos de Xalapa receives a decent amount of Mexican tourism during vacations.  Many of our customers during those periods were of the upper middle and upper upper middle classes from Mexico City as far away as Hermosillo, Sonora, and Monterrey, Nuevo Leon.  They frequently lauded my cupcakes and said that we should move our business to Mexico City, Guadalajara, San Miguel de Allende, Monterrey... where the people had the money to pay the value of our product.  One day, a wealthy family from Mexico City passed our table.  One of their children was in Canada, the other working in China and fluent in Mandarin.  The señor said, "Look, your cupcakes are good.  But, not to offend you, this coffee is better than your cupcakes.  It must be offered in other cities.  You don't find this quality in Mexico and people will pay for it!"  The problem was in having the money to relocate.  


Last year I returned to my father-in-law the equivalent of $10,000. We had gross sales of $130,000.  One thing necessary to understand is the difference in cost of living in Mexico from that of the U.S.  In 2010 we paid on average the equivalent of $100/per week in food groceries for minimally 4 men and one woman.  At the moment I pay for half the food at the ranch.  We are minimally 12 adults living here.  My daily expenditure is less then $10...  


I'm going to leave it at this for the moment...