Triptych
Post 20: Joyce Devlin, Peter Coffin, Muriel Anderson
Joyce Devlin. Painter. (17 July 2009, Ottawa) Kyrie has ordered The Owl Service on DVD, a Granada version of the young adult novel from 1967. I recount how it unnerved me as a child reader seized by Alan Garner’s feverish avian aporia, keeping the bedroom light on all night. The video has a ‘special feature’ following Garner in 1980 in and around his Cheshire house. An Artist’s house.
Our residence at the Roper House at the end of Sparks and Queen Streets was for some years the home of metal sculptor Bruce Garner and his painter wife Joyce Devlin. Léa once visited them here when she was young. Its magnificent landing and grand window features in Devlin’s triptych hanging in the lobby of the Morisset library at the University of Ottawa. Indeed, its three panels were painted here in the 1970s.
One passes Garner’s sculptures on Sparks St., including, as architect Barry Padolsky pointed out to me, a tiny ethereal angel atop a sewage vent pipe at the western edge of the Garden of the Provinces.
Peter Coffin. Bishop. (19 June 2011, Ottawa.) The largest of the family of black squirrels who live beside us in a venerable elm is peering into the west-facing window of my third-floor turret study. He or she—I guess that it is the male—clings to the screen, making a scratching sound. This isn’t the first time that squirrels have presented themselves—they occupied our dryer vent on the second floor. Once we allowed a pregnant female to nest between the kitchen windows—but never in seven years has one appeared here on the west side. It is precarious even for a squirrel to scale the brickwork of the turret and hang solely from the soft screening.
He’s gone, and I understand that he’s not here seeking food. His claws easily could tear the mesh; he’s left just one small puncture. Coming back for a second visit, we study each other closely before I close the window: he’s perfectly groomed, with complete confidence, powerful limbs, a piercing look.
Animals sense things first—is this trepidation in advance of the Armageddon that the current Bishop and his committee have ordained for the squirrels’ habitat? The great tree will be felled along with its fellows in this hallowed precinct. The racked canoes have already been removed.
The black squirrel outside the turret window requests my help. I cannot intercede but only record his visit. As the descendant of a bishop, I elect to say nothing of the new cleric downstairs. His predecessor, Bishop Coffin, in sharp contrast, is an actual holy man. Not just an even regard, a white-hot faith flashed in his eyes at the Christmas service. He was to visit Baghdad with the Imam of Ottawa to urge the freeing of hostages, although that became unnecessary.
Muriel Anderson. Great-Aunt. (August 2011. Ottawa.) The death of aunt Muriel last Sunday at the age of 97 marks the final passing of my grandparents’ generation. Muriel did not grow up at Osland, the Icelandic community on Smith Island south of Prince Rupert. It was her sister, Winnie, my grandmother, who arrived there as the schoolteacher and went on to marry my grandfather Daniel Kristmanson. But like her sister, Muriel embodied its ethos: anti-hierarchical, tolerant, collaborative, and joyous in the minutiae of lived existence.
Unlike other elders, Muriel seemed highly centered as a subject, as if she’d remained consistently herself through the vicissitudes of a very long life. Intellectually sharp and critical, she was superbly courteous and interested. When my parents visited her several days before her death, tiny and curled up in the hospital, they feared she’d already lost consciousness.
“Thank you very much for visiting me,” she said when the nurse awakened her. “Thank you for coming; now I must sleep.”
Muriel’s final years were lived in Höfn, the Icelandic rest home in Vancouver that her mother had helped to found in the 1940s, its generous Scandinavian-influenced architecture overlooks the Fraser River. Muriel’s suite contained some of her own art works and also a small painting mailed to her by writer Henry Miller, with whom my plucky great-aunt had a correspondence.
Displayed in the hallway outside her door were a series of archival photographs from the first decades of the 20th century documenting the string of Icelandic-Canadian settlements along the West Coast. She was certainly the only current resident of Höfn ever to have visited Osland, if not its sole resident of Icelandic descent, and as such she became something of a leader in the home.
She’d reached the end of her boardwalk, having fully experienced its long curve; and at the very end there remained something mystical. Perhaps it was bequeathed by her father, a youthful founder of the Lutheran Synod in Manitoba who later became a spiritualist. It was augured in my vivid dream of a few years ago in which Muriel, grandma Winnie and Kyrie floated together near the ceiling inside the lofty Roper House, in a state of utter and complete calm, in a warm shuttered light.
As if she’d been holding out for this, Muriel passed away just a few hours after her sixth great-grand-child was born.
I lenjoyed reading this loving description of your aunt. Thank you for sharing.
Bernice