before she noticed her first skipped period. Tra-la.
One thing I may have forgotten to mention: X arrived in St. Johnâs on a sailing vessel made of garbage. Bits of Styrofoam and rubber tires and crushed metal from the dump. He was one of six environmentalists who were circumnavigating the world to protest the practice of selling garbage to developing countries because we have nowhere else to put it.
The kind of garbage people think they want because they watch infomercials at one in the morning where women in leotards strap themselves into big vibrating belts that are supposed to make them lose twenty pounds in two days and only cost $22.99, or the kind of junk weâre supposed to invent in our Entrepreneurship class.
There are beaches all over Africa covered with fridge doors and used tampons and Ritz cracker boxes, old shoes, the husks of microwave ovens with the glass smashed out, car batteries leaking neon green juice that would sizzle the eyes out of your head if you even glanced at it, things with a slime of maggots squirming and writhing in the heat, cars crunched and stacked like colorful pancakes â mountains of this stuff dumped on white beaches, mountains that tumble toward the jungles beyond the beach and crawl inland.
This, apparently, enraged my father.
So X and his friends built a boat entirely of garbage. And sailed around the world.
In short, my dad â not exactly Youth Entrepreneur Champion-of-the-Year genetic material.
And then thereâs my mother. Miranda is an artist, but she makes conceptual art and installations, none of which sell. They arenât supposed to sell. Last winter, for instance, she did a series of ice sculptures. Her last piece was a mother polar bear and cub set adrift on an ice pan.
She carved the ice with a chainsaw, chisels and drills, and she polished it with a blowtorch. She wore goggles and a snowsuit, her steel-toed boots. Yanked the pull-cord on the chainsaw and thereâs a cloud of blue smoke. She touched the chainsaw to the block of ice and a giant fan of ice chips flew into the sky.
I donât know how she could see the shape in the block of ice, but she walked around it and stood back and moved in. She scratched some lines on the surface. Then the saw squealed and ground and ice flew some more and, little by little, the shoulder of a lumbering, downcast momma polar bear emerged, the surface roughed-up like fur, the big head swinging to the side to check for her cub, the doomed little family emerging in the evening light.
Melting is part of the piece. Itâs a comment on global warming, Miranda said.
The whole piece â two bears on an ice pan â was constructed on logs so it could be rolled out to sea and set adrift. We had a big bonfire the day it was launched. All of Mirandaâs friends showed up. It felt like half the population of St. Johnâs was there. Amberâs mom and dad were there too. Amber and I kept the fire going and helped the little kids roast marshmallows and wieners.
There was an essay about Miranda in Canadian Art with lots of pictures, and another one in Border Crossings and she heard from galleries across Canada, some of them offering an exhibit. So the piece was a huge success. But of course you couldnât sell a melting polar bear and her cub.
This summer sheâs doing an installation of sculptures made out of bird corpses covered in oil â it will be a powerful comment on the environmental dangers of the oil industry but not a big money maker, Iâm guessing.
Miranda also writes a parenting blog in the hopes that she will garner advertising once she secures a big following. She was waitressing and doing shifts at Sunny Horizons, a private company that takes care of babies who are wards of the state. But she had to stay up all night in an apartment behind the mall and the babies were sometimes physically abused and the job made it impossible to really be
One thing I may have forgotten to mention: X arrived in St. Johnâs on a sailing vessel made of garbage. Bits of Styrofoam and rubber tires and crushed metal from the dump. He was one of six environmentalists who were circumnavigating the world to protest the practice of selling garbage to developing countries because we have nowhere else to put it.
The kind of garbage people think they want because they watch infomercials at one in the morning where women in leotards strap themselves into big vibrating belts that are supposed to make them lose twenty pounds in two days and only cost $22.99, or the kind of junk weâre supposed to invent in our Entrepreneurship class.
There are beaches all over Africa covered with fridge doors and used tampons and Ritz cracker boxes, old shoes, the husks of microwave ovens with the glass smashed out, car batteries leaking neon green juice that would sizzle the eyes out of your head if you even glanced at it, things with a slime of maggots squirming and writhing in the heat, cars crunched and stacked like colorful pancakes â mountains of this stuff dumped on white beaches, mountains that tumble toward the jungles beyond the beach and crawl inland.
This, apparently, enraged my father.
So X and his friends built a boat entirely of garbage. And sailed around the world.
In short, my dad â not exactly Youth Entrepreneur Champion-of-the-Year genetic material.
And then thereâs my mother. Miranda is an artist, but she makes conceptual art and installations, none of which sell. They arenât supposed to sell. Last winter, for instance, she did a series of ice sculptures. Her last piece was a mother polar bear and cub set adrift on an ice pan.
She carved the ice with a chainsaw, chisels and drills, and she polished it with a blowtorch. She wore goggles and a snowsuit, her steel-toed boots. Yanked the pull-cord on the chainsaw and thereâs a cloud of blue smoke. She touched the chainsaw to the block of ice and a giant fan of ice chips flew into the sky.
I donât know how she could see the shape in the block of ice, but she walked around it and stood back and moved in. She scratched some lines on the surface. Then the saw squealed and ground and ice flew some more and, little by little, the shoulder of a lumbering, downcast momma polar bear emerged, the surface roughed-up like fur, the big head swinging to the side to check for her cub, the doomed little family emerging in the evening light.
Melting is part of the piece. Itâs a comment on global warming, Miranda said.
The whole piece â two bears on an ice pan â was constructed on logs so it could be rolled out to sea and set adrift. We had a big bonfire the day it was launched. All of Mirandaâs friends showed up. It felt like half the population of St. Johnâs was there. Amberâs mom and dad were there too. Amber and I kept the fire going and helped the little kids roast marshmallows and wieners.
There was an essay about Miranda in Canadian Art with lots of pictures, and another one in Border Crossings and she heard from galleries across Canada, some of them offering an exhibit. So the piece was a huge success. But of course you couldnât sell a melting polar bear and her cub.
This summer sheâs doing an installation of sculptures made out of bird corpses covered in oil â it will be a powerful comment on the environmental dangers of the oil industry but not a big money maker, Iâm guessing.
Miranda also writes a parenting blog in the hopes that she will garner advertising once she secures a big following. She was waitressing and doing shifts at Sunny Horizons, a private company that takes care of babies who are wards of the state. But she had to stay up all night in an apartment behind the mall and the babies were sometimes physically abused and the job made it impossible to really be
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