But now, in my own quiet way. Too, often we make it harder than it has to be. I have little choice but to let it be, and do the best that I myself can do. The rest of the world will always be out of my control.

A softball team that put a keg on 2nd base. Some folk were trying to be dead serious about the game, but as we were mostly Deadheads it was easy to kid each other out of the team spirit blues. I astounded everyone, especially myself, once when I caught the ball by sheer accident. I usually struck out at bat, and much more enjoyed hootin' and hollering from the stands. We went to lots of Oakland A's games together. Some of the guys rode to the games with me in my bug. A few games into the season, they once accused me of jinxing Jose Canseco by simply being there.Man, they could always take BART if they were that paranoid about it, I told 'em. As if Jose wasn't his own jinx. As if all of us are not always jinxing ourselves. You've got to keep things in a positive perspective if you want to enjoy yourself. The secret of life IS enjoying the passage of time, and any fool CAN do it if they set their mind to it. Remind me later, that I said this. I have ways of forgetting myself some times.

They were always very kind to me. They needed the extra income, so when Mike and I hit some inevitable uncomfortable drama time, they offered me room & board in Bay Area Suburbia where their pink and perfect home hosted 86 rose bushes. Ray and Elise were as beautiful as their 3-yr old boy. Saturday mornings, the whole household cleaned. Sunlight streamed through beautiful windows, as we all polished furniture, cleaned floors. and paid attention to details. Saturday afternoon's were spent working on the 86 rose bushes, and it was a time of accomplishing small miracles. Bouquets of roses were in all of our bedrooms and dotted the different areas of the house according to who felt like putting one together. Nice, peaceful Saturday's that I enjoyed participating in, but couldn't wait to flee as early as possibe on Saturday evenings. To go play with the Deadheads and the Coneheads and the Cacophony kids in the city. Sean had known he was going to break my heart from the begining, and I had known it as well. He sold me his 1970 VW bug for $40-largely out of feeling guilty. I bought it largely out of letting him feel guilty. He chose "Desperado" to be his theme song. He claimed he couldn't feel romantic love, regardless of the fine things that were left upon his table, that he only wanted the things he could not have. Fair enough. I chose to buy the VW for $40. It took me all over the hills and far away and anywhere I chose that I needed to go. Then, back again to the Pink and Perfect family who watched me come and go with amusement

Artists, actors, curiosity-seekers, scattered characters. On BART, complete with Roulette wheel, dressed as 19th century dandies, they held Black Jack gambling parties until they got kicked off for not getting off. We went bowling in formal attire, gowns, gloves, tiarras for the ladies, coats and top hats for the gents. A scavenger hunt back and forth through the parade on Chineese New Year, up and down the hills and streets of San Frasciscio under an astonishing full moon. Joining the witches and warlocks on the Presidio's Beach to watch "Burning Man"-his head full of fireworks, all of us dancing and drumming in the sand until the soldiers ran us off, as we lacked a permit to burn a huge scarecrow on a raft in the Bay. Formal dinners on the Golden Gate Bridge usually brought camera crews if it was a slow news day. My favorite was probably a formal pitch-in dinner in the middle of China Town in a laundry mat. We all brought a single sock to wash, covered the folding tables with fine linen, and candles, and waltzed up and down the aisles of machines to the musical score of "Oklahoma!" The laundry's windows were lined with Oriental onlookers not quite able to grasp what these crazy Americans were doing. When we finished dining and dancing, we picked up our mess, grabbed our socks and calmly left. We just ran around the Bay Area being young, crazy and fun. Cacophony meaning a noisy, musical din-we did that, too.

Built during WWII by a Catholic brother and sister, it resembeled a small castle. There are 2 actual bombshelters in the basement. When my Dad was bidding on buying the place, he was bidding against a guy who wanted to turn it into a funeral home.Yup-it's that fancy. Obviously something went right for us, as Dad eventually bought it. My bedroom was above the breakfast nook, enclosed in a battlement-like structure. The music store was on the main floor, our bedrooms upstairs, kitchen in back of the store, and living room and the eventual bar in the basement. On Sundays, the store was closed, and Dad usually had a Dixie-Land party. He could play the piano with one hand, and the organ with the other. There was usually a guy on sax, another on trumpet, and sometimes one on clairinet. Sunday strollers would stop outside, listen to the music and check out the house. I saw plenty of strangers out tapping their toes, wishing they weren't strangers...inside, was Dad's in-crowd. Singing, dancing, drinking, and that's just what they let us kids see. The music was not my style, because, of course, it was Dad's music. "Begin The Beguine," "In The Mood,"Stardust"," Sentimental Journey", and anything remotely related to Louis Armstrong tunes. Parties were the norm. Parties remained the norm at The House of Music, after I left, my brother left, my lil sis married, and Mom took the two remaining kids with her and left. I used to call Dad" the Jerry Garcia of Smalltown, Indiana." Always the Good Time Charlie, always playing gigs around the area, always partying hearty, always chasing around an altered state. Years later, I spent a winter in New Hampshire teaching myself to drink Scotch, so that I could be his drinking buddy when I came home. Johhny Walker Black, the older the better, was a warm teacher for an impressionable young girl on her own in New England, weathering the multiple snowstorms so far from the strange scene that had once been her home. I learned well. It was a small hospital in Portsmouth, with a tight-knit staff of enlisted folk who did our best to be hippies in the service of our country. There must have been 12 of us, all hanging out in an old school house we had converted into a club. Playing chess, all of us reading Hobbit Trilogy and discussing the latest chapters,listening to Zepplin, Cream, and Jethro Tull on a stereo contributed to the cause. I continuted the norm, and it was a good time to be me. Those were the Hash daze. More than 30 years later, I can still taste it. Off and on Purple Haze got in our brain. Or chocolate mesc. "Bare Trees" was more than a Fleetwood Mac album, it was beautiful and everywhere we went. We'd go to Boston for concerts, and once to Watkin's Glenn, NY to see The Allman Bros, The Dead, and another band that I cannot recall as I spent most of the time they played contemplating the mud puddle I found myself sitting in. More and more, as time went by, I found myself to be walking in my father's footsteps, the life of the party. In Maryland, 8 or 10 of us rented houses in nice neighborhoods and parties were the norm. They needed a nickname for me, and "Bite-Size" is the one they originally wanted for me. It just didn't set well with my quest for a low-profile for my crowd to shout, "Hey, Bite-Size, over here!" in the hospital cafeteria when I stood with my lunch tray looking for a friendly face. One night, jovially in the grasp of another self-taught Scotch lesson, one pal commented that I was "loose as a Moose-but pretty sweet about it" I pounced on the moment and procaimed SugarMoose was the name I wanted for myself, and so, it came to be. Years later, a few folks still refer to me as Sugarmoose, and as they still love me decades down the line, they've earned the right. When I was married, and he wasn't calling me "Bitch," he always referred to me as "Moose"...he never called me Cher. I always let it slide. I let so much slide. Parties were always the norm.