Submitted by Richard Harrison
Some Thoughts about Myrtle Lambert
— for the gathering to celebrate her life, September 22, 2018.
by Richard Harrison, Sunnyhill Housing Co-op.
I was thinking about Myrtle in the week leading up to this moment when we were all going to remember her together. My guess is, given Myrtle’s place in our place, there are a lot of memories, and in the way it is with all public figures, there were sides to her that some of us knew well and others never knew at all.
You can rarely do this in the Western world because, for the most part, we don’t choose our names. They are given to us and we form little clubs around what we got. But a little over a century ago, it became popular to name people after plants – Daisy and Violet and Rose – and Myrtle is one of those names, so I looked it up to see if there was anything her name could point me to in remembering her.
In Canada, apparently, no one has been given the name since 1966. Just as she was the oldest member of our Co-op, and the storehouse of the collective memory of its past, she was close to being the last of her kind to bear the sensibility of her time, and you could tell she was proud of it.
If you Google “Myrtle” – a phrase that I think she would rightfully scoff at — you find that the name for the plant comes into English relatively unchanged from the Greek, so it has a long memory. So far, so good.
It grows just over 5 feet tall. Check.
Best sentence in the description of the plant: “The true myrtle is a showy evergreen shrub that is relatively frost hardy.”
Let’s think about that. Myrtle loved her trees. She was everywhere. And she was a hardy one, walking the neighborhood that she also loved. Anything went wrong, a theft in someone’s home, an injured jack rabbit, she’d call you, because if something needed to be done, she was someone who needed it to be done now.
But her protectiveness led her into conflicts. She used to chase kids out the trees they were climbing in; her reputation was formidable. And one day some kids egged her house in reply. That was an ugly moment. It could have been uglier, but it turned around. When my son told me what had happened to Myrtle’s door, and saw that I was upset about it for Myrtle and for the Co-op, he and his friends went and washed her house. Some people might carry the bad part of that story, but ever since then, I only heard Myrtle praise him and his friends for the fine people they were. I only saw her turn that moment of conflict into a moment of community building and praise.
Here’s another bit of information, and I quote: “Myrtle essential oil has a clear, fresh scent that is slightly camphoraceous, i.e. just like Eucalyptus.”
Well, she could be bracing, no doubt about that. To be honest, one of the times I was brought in to help run meetings using Robert’s Rules was because Myrtle’a attitude of “ act now” crept into her in meetings whether someone else was talking or not. I can remember more than one time having to tell her, Myrtle, please stay on point, or to cut her off. It was a conflict that I didn’t really want to have, but after that first meeting, she came up to me and said, “Good meeting. Sometimes these things go so off track.”
She didn’t have the best Off-switch when it came to her memories of Co-op life or the Terrible Error of not buying the land that we live on today; she didn’t really tire of telling that story, and I often wonder now what it is about the stories that people can’t stop telling, what it is that excites the memory so much that it has to be relived, almost as if in the telling we can go back and make it right. We can’t. And we know that, so it must be something else, something almost sacred in the act of not forgetting.
I’m going to say that Myrtle’s recounting was part of her role as what, in other cultures, would be called the Wise Woman: not to be always right the way the romantics would have us believe, but to care fiercely, and to be the exercise of the collective memory and conscience of the community; to remind us, who so easily get caught up in the present and future, that the past is a big place with more to teach us than we remember to know.
Thank you, Myrtle. In the same sense of the word as your name was born in, it’s been an honour.
