When I was about 11 or so, my friend Nicki invited me over to have New Year’s Eve at her house.
“We can watch the ball drop,” she said.
“WOAH. What is that?” I asked, fascinated. I was 11 and had no TV, I had no clue about this ball that dropped and Nicki seemed so sophisticated for knowing such things.
“It’s in New York and it drops at midnight.”
“Seriously? What does it look like?” I asked.
“Um, it’s glass and has lots of lights in it,” she replied. Then she handed me another Atomic Fireball. (I lived off those things when I was a kid. Joey hates them and he won’t kiss me if I’ve been eating them now, which I think is discrimination.)
I was so excited for New Year’s Eve now. I was going to watch a big glass ball (WITH LIGHTS EVEN!) get thrown off a skyscraper roof and crash to the ground and break into a million glittering shards of glass at precisely midnight.
I ask you, what could be cooler?!? A fantastic way to usher in the New Year, ain’t so?
Well, there I was at Nicki’s house on New Year’s Eve. A sleepy 11 year old, trying desperately to look like I was super awake and not at all tired, because that would be extremely uncool – HELLO!, and buzzing with excitement about the very cool glass ball carnage I was about to witness on “live TV”. (I was 11. I didn’t quite understand the time difference thing. Plus we didn’t have a TV at home.)
“There’s the ball,” Nicki pointed out.
“Wow,” I said.
Then, suddenly, the ball began to descend. ON A POLE. In just a few moments I could tell that it was not going to break into a million billion pieces, and I grew very disillusioned.
“Nuts, I wanted it to break,” I said.
“Yeah, it doesn’t break,” Nicki said. Then she handed me another Atomic Fireball.
And that was my anticlimactic New Year’s celebration. Every single year since then I have tried to watch the ball drop, in hopes that something dreadful will happen and it will break off its pole and go crashing to the ground.
If I was the New Year’s Eve boss, there would totally be a glass ball full of lights getting launched off a skyscraper, only I’d have the math all worked out so it would explode into the concrete at the very instant the clock struck midnight.
I plan to watch said ball drop tonight. It will probably be lame, just like every other year, but a girl can hope…right?
