home Archives – Lindsey Alexander

This is my grandmother Roberta Sharp’s eulogy, given at her memorial service. A mother, grandmother, aunt, friend, wanderer, and free spirit, she is loved and missed.

Bobbi Sharp

Hi, I’m Lindsey and Roberta Sharp was my grandmother. One of my strongest memories of her is the smell of her house: potpourri and cigarettes. It might be an acquired taste, but my sister and I love it. I don’t know where I’ll find that smell again—her particular blend. Anyway, one of the things Grama taught me was that potpourri doesn’t cover up the smell of cigarettes.

And she taught me all sorts of things, much of which was practical: Save the bows from presents to re-use; buy those bows and bags at a dollar store. It’s easier to keep a pair of scissors in every room than to go on a hunt for one pair of scissors. Slice a bunch of cherry tomatoes in half at once by sandwiching them between two Tupperware lids with rims. Always have chips and dip for company. Get your mammograms. Wicker furniture does come back. HSN and QVC have good deals on beautiful jewelry. Post as much as you want to on social media—we’re all on there anyway. Keep a clean house, which is maybe one of the lessons I have the most trouble with. Have two or three meals you’re known for. Do your job. If you’re stunning, be casual. Laugh impishly, and if something’s funny, laugh. Silence is golden. Alone time is necessary. If your son-in-law moves in with you, he’s easier to handle if you serve him Kahlua in his coffee. If you get a riding mower stuck with its front half up a tree, call Clark. Family traditions are important. If someone marries into the family, tell them how much you like them. No fight is as important as family—if you can be right or get along, get along.

Grama grew to keep her life simple because often, life upended itself. Among its many changes, she survived single motherhood, a tornado, and the death of her best friend, her younger brother, Gary. She remembered her parents in many ways, including marking their birth and death days on her Thomas Kinkade calendar.

She taught me to be honest and to let people know that I love them. She said “Hi Sweetie” whenever I walked through the door and liked all of my Facebook posts. She always told me she was proud of me, and I know she was proud of Ssangie and Sara, that they were starting out in life and hard workers, that Sara got a job in a competitive field and Ssangie bought a house on her own. She was proud of and happy for Aaron, Nikki, and Sierra, too, and loved learning how their lives are unfolding. She really wanted to know us, which is even why she liked getting us gifts, knowing what someone likes is one way of knowing them. Some of my favorite times I spent with Grama were as an awkward teenager, trying on clothes when she took me shopping for my birthday. At a time when it felt like anything I put on would be ugly, she helped me have confidence by spending time with me and saying it was all cute.

One of the main things I think she taught many of us? The view is where it’s at, go and take it in. On a beautiful day, go for a drive. If you have a dream vacation, go. Grama loved a view—especially a shared one, like with Grama Baumle and my mom and dad in Jericho, Arizona, on the ledge of a skinny road with no shoulder, where they had a flat tire that had to be fixed; or tracing the upper rim of Lake Superior with Mom and Cheryl, where music played on the beach and the sun didn’t go down until almost midnight; Glacier and Seattle, places that Sara and I had gone that she’d gone before, she’d send us pictures on social media of those places all the time. She knew Seattle so well, she went to the first Starbucks before it was a chain, and said she knew it would be big. She could tell Sara a story about every picture she brought home from her trip. One of my favorite memories of her was just driving home from Thanksgivings on the scenic route, or watching her watch all the cows in the valley below our cabin. Many of her trips were to visit her women friends, who were dear to her. And on her trips, she’d go anywhere—fearless, sometimes into the mountains in the dark to blow off steam, sometimes into cities, where she’d also park anywhere, an embassy, a mansion’s driveway; and when she reached a roadside motel, she’d ask to see a room before she decided whether to stay. It didn’t have to be fancy, but it did need to be clean. One of the views she liked best was from her porch at home. Maybe her favorite trip was her one with Mom and Cheryl to Tofino to celebrate her 70th birthday, her favorite view not the water or the mountains, but seeing her two favorite people happy together.

She loved when our small family was happy and together. I know because I’ve seen it, but also because she told me. She loved that Mom and Cheryl are best friends. She loved that my dad and Clark are their best friends, too. That through all this time and all these miles, all the views we’ve taken in, we’ve all stayed together. One of her last dreams was that we all had houses in a row. (Cheryl reminded her she’d been watching HGTV.)

She was one of my favorite people on Earth; now she’s one of my favorite people somewhere else. I love her very much.

Her biggest lessons didn’t come from the biggest trip or the prettiest picture. They are in simple moments, non-stories: my mom coming home from kindergarten and eating soup with her while they watched Bewitched. Her feeding marshmallows to her dog. Just sitting quietly in the car together and watching the world blur out into greens, blues, and grays. She took a complicated life and made it simple and satisfying by filling it with love. As long as Sara, Cassandra, and I weren’t fidgeting, playing near something fragile (like the glass frog), or making weird noises, we were loved exactly as we are. Maybe this is the lesson all good grandparents impart, but I felt it especially from Grama. Maybe because she was exactly who she was, sometimes stubbornly; she did what she wanted to do. She didn’t moralize, kept her judgments to herself (and maybe our moms), and let things go. Forgiveness wasn’t something one asked for—we just got it. I remember apologizing a couple hours after snapping at her one Thanksgiving and she looked totally confused—she’d already forgotten whatever it was. The people in Bobbi Sharp’s life were loved. She let us know it. We were loved. We love her very much. Her legacy will be how much we love each other for as long as we have and how we show it.

Friends, I am back from (clears throat) a yoga retreat in Nicaragua. Yes, yoga. More specifically, the Find What Feels Good/Yoga With Adriene retreat. The essay below is what I took there and took from it.

Welcome! This is the view looking out of a domicile in Maderas Village, Nicaragua.

Friends, I could tell you about the monkeys that played in the trees above me, howling hilarious (or rapacious?) noises at each other; I could tell you about being overwhelmed my first time seeing the Pacific Ocean—how hard the waves break (no, really I couldn’t); I could tell you about that ocean’s throaty, sultry rhythm and blues, and how, as in Matthew Lippman’s poem “From God’s Notebook” one can hear it and say “It is my fault, it’s not my fault”; I could show you pictures worthy of (if I had the right hashtags!) capturing the Instagram hearts of thousands of scrolling strangers worldwide, one photo in particular of boats without docks, anchored right beyond shoreline, bobbing like fishing tackle and lures, and beyond these boats a succession of blue oblivions; how conflicted I felt about traveling somewhere and meeting very few residents besides staff; how conflicted I felt about how much I have, how I need to work harder to share it. Then, there were the flowers, like bright mid-century atomic clocks, like the skirts of can-can dancers, big and flashy and a little peek at something sexy; American flowers, I’m afraid, will never do now.

Sometimes I’m convinced the Earth was the mold for the curvature of the question mark. The only thing forged in iron the questions.

Who am I and what am I made of?

Do I want to make my mark on the world or leave no trace?

What is home? Where is it? Can’t some well-intentioned child set me on the front of his bicycle and pedal me past the moon and there already? When will I be beamed up to where I am supposed to be?

In my real life, my career is not thrilling, and sometimes can feel like it lacks purpose or meaning. My hobbies interest me more than my 9 to 5. My spouse and I recently moved to a beautiful area but I have yet to make lady friends (essential to any Jane Austen novel and also to the good life!). I struggle to acknowledge that I take issue with these things because I live such a charmed existence of choices (dog! loving spouse! instruments and books strewn across a house! a garden! family and friends who if not near are dear to me!); but of course (only me?) repression always seems to transform into wallowing. I’m fine! I’m fine! I’m . . . lying in bed all day and if you question it I am hissing at you like a cat trapped under a laundry basket.

If I sketched this life out, it would look so plain, Lindsey, this hissing voice starts up. Maybe you don’t have friends because you’re a weirdo, Lindsey. (Fair enough.) You’re a traitor to feminism because you are young-ish and married and are not leaning in, Lindsey. What about your obligation to the planet? To your family and your mentors? To yourself?

And that move to that beautiful place.

Home is a slippery word. It seems everywhere you go, someone is telling you about home and what it is and that there’s no place like it. Home is where the heart is; home is where the light is; home is wherever I’m with you; change your place and there you are!

Click my heels three times.

Woops.

Enter another night spent on the Youtubez (I’m gonna say with wine, but if wine wasn’t present, it was in spirit). Enter watching yoga video on said Youtubez or Googling for one and finding YWA at the start of a new year, a year, I promised myself, that I would work to “embrace routine,” that I would work to be content. There was pre-recorded Adriene saying it was time to be responsible for my own happiness.

It’s own your shit o’clock!

It was a bigger decision for me to get on the mat the first time, to get on it every day since, than it was to pony up for a YWA-style trip to Nicaragua, which I did.

The first night there, we were supposed to say what brought us; for me, I talked about having been more brain than body before yoga. It’s true. A mind can float anywhere, a body can only be one place at one time.

But what kind of home is a body?

The mostly inescapable kind. An untakebackable gift.

It’s hard enough to be comfortable in my own brain, much less my own body. How to build anything outside of either? Instead, for years, I went invisible. It’s easier than it sounds. After all, isn’t there a whole song about hiding light under a bushel?

The only answers I’ve found: Burn the bushel. Not either but both. Less or more and. (To make that or mean more than it did before—Sondheim fans unite!)

In a foreign country in a jungle on a mountain in a hut under a ceiling of dried palm fronds, I laid down. In a guided meditation after a particularly steamy practice, Adriene asked us to imagine a walk in a jungle, at some point landing on a warm rock on a beach, making ourselves comfortable.

“What do you see?”

The top of my vision: a(n extremely fashionable) straw sunhat, ocean in periphery, and front and center, there on the sand, my husband in the cap he always wears and our dog, walking toward me.

Imagine that—a desire fulfilled, and yet. What I want is what I have and I just want more of it.

Soon before heading to Nicaragua, I read an article about how Emily Dickinson—that poet long rumored (despite any attempts toward right-ing) to have lived a lonely spinster life (can spinsters have un-lonely lives? nay!) crying into her rejection letters, locked in an attic in Amherst—had a garden full of rare flowers, that she spent days and seasons at this hobby, that when she was alive she was better known as a botanist than as a failed poet.

To think, a life thought tragic (and sexless! and progeny-less! but thank goodness we kept the only thing worth salvaging—the art, right fellas?) was full (and created life after life after life!) and maybe (who knows?) full of happiness on the daily. One way to draw it is dreary; another full of color and light. (The truth maybe an overhead projector on which we can layer slides.)

Like those poses where I’m pretty sure it looks like I’m doing nothing but I’m working up a sweat, from the outside it’s hard to know how much work is going on inside. Looking from the outside in—I don’t have to do that with myself; why not grant myself the gift of not doing that? The world is full of harsh eyes; I can give soft eyes. (I give really good eye—sue me!) The world is full of bustle; I can give stillness. The world is full of noise; I can give it a listen, I can give it quiet, but that doesn’t mean being invisible.

Me, rocking the same hat that Sissy Spacek wears in one episode of Bloodline Season 2, I am pretty sure | Photo credit Jennifer "Woodsy" Woods—see her photos daily here: https://www.instagram.com/woodsygolightly/ — Me, rocking the same hat that Sissy Spacek wears in one episode of Bloodline Season 2, I am pretty sure | Photo credit Jennifer “Woodsy” Woods—see her photos daily here: https://www.instagram.com/woodsygolightly/

I misunderstood the dictum to, in times of trouble, turn inward. I thought it meant going it alone. I mistook my shell for my insides and wasn’t careful and almost, or did for a moment, turned to stone. But then, during those years, all that darn laughter, all those dreadful singing people on porches and on couches, all the bad dance moves one can’t help but dust off. I’m thankful for all the people who weren’t afraid of my being afraid, who aren’t afraid of extremes of volume or feeling, or of fumbling. People who will just sit with you are the best people. (Many people who took the FWFG Nicaragua trip are the best people.)

Two beautiful women, Andrea and Jude, avec moi, all drinking delicious juice. Another photo from Oscar Lopez, taken at a party that will go down in infamy. Check out his website at http://www.be-lost.com/about/

In line to board the plane from Managua back to the States, an older woman—dressed in bright blue—in front of me was speaking to the flight attendants in Spanish, trying to work something out. Double-checking that I had out the right tickets, that I hadn’t dropped my passport, I didn’t pay it much mind. And continued to read More about the author my friend had told me about, as the author had written a fantastic article regarding the conditions during which one should avoid air travel. When we reached the nexus between plane door and hall, I realized she was trying to transport a piñata, several feet tall, of a blonde girl onto the plane.

I like that stupid-looking, needs-a-comb blonde piñata girl—full of nothing or full of sweets—waiting for the delight of being busted open. I like the lady in blue insisting—checked or no—she make it on the plane. I’m grateful she asked (or, that I think she did), and that we sat rows apart on a machine in the sky headed toward a place we both chose to go.

Tag: home

In Memory of Roberta Sharp, My Grandmother (1945–2018)

This is my grandmother Roberta Sharp’s eulogy, given at her memorial service. A mother, grandmother, aunt, friend, wanderer, and free spirit, she is loved and missed.

Nicaragua, the Blonde, and the Lady in Blue