CHAPTER ONE
A FEW BITES OF THE BIG APPLE
The evening began like any other New Year’s Eve in New York City, frosty- cold with overcoats over ugly Christmas sweaters and bumper-to-bumper people bumping in the streets. Everyone of note was there just waiting for the right moment to count down the old year and celebrate the long-awaited arrival of the half century, the year 2050.
Emily, although a stranger to the crowd, was soon to be as well-known as even the President but for now, she was in New York with her mom and dad, all the way from Mushaboom, a quiet neighbourly town on the south-eastern belly of Nova Scotia. She was totally wrapped up in the moment, chirpy and upbeat, waiting impatiently for the ball to drop in Times Square.
She stood there with her fur-lined overcoat completely unbuttoned with two mittens tucked away in the pockets. Oddly though, as frosty cold as it was, it didn’t seem to bother Emily.
“Emily, button up your coat dear,” Mom insisted. “We’re not in Florida.”
“But Mom, it’s no colder here than at home. I hardly ever button up at home even in the middle of winter. Are you sure I’m not a fish?”
“Now Lassie, your mom’s right,” added an older woman alongside with rosy-red cheeks and a black pointed hat. “It’s colder this evening Dearie, than witches’ breath in the wee hours of the morning.”
“It’s cold alright,” a nicely rounded man with a white beard joined in. “But it’s nothing like at home.” Emily smiled but said nothing; she was that excited just to be there!
Most kids on the eve of becoming a teenager dream of a new crush at school, the latest techy implants or becoming the next movie star on the new 3-D sphere, but not so for Emily. She was happy just to be there with her parents, enjoying the cold and gazing upward with big eyes at the Crystal Ball in Times Square.
She couldn’t tell you why she was so fascinated with New York City because she didn’t know herself, any more than knowing why green was her chosen colour, why she preferred winter to summer or, why green licorice was her favourite candy. To be there on New Year’s Eve for the ball-drop was all Emily had talked about for months, which is why her parents made sure to bring her there while she was still healthy enough to enjoy a few bites of the Big Apple. Emily was a life-long sufferer of asthma, although her condition was far more severe than most, requiring constant observation and medication. That aside, she was over-the-moon excited with the crowd and the lights.
By now the little hand and the big hand on the tower clock were in position, one nearly over the other on top of the ‘twelve’. Emily imagined a third hand as well, a second hand, slowly rounding the ‘six’ and ticking its way upward toward the ‘nine’. And no surprise, the same old numbers as every year were counted down. “Ten, nine, eight…” when suddenly, with some numbers yet unaccounted for, the Crystal Ball froze in its track. The crowd gasped and grabbed on to each other as if the New Year couldn’t possibly arrive until the ball dropped all the way down.
Nevertheless, all calendars in the time zone awoke on the stroke of midnight and dutifully turned over to January 1st, 2050, a mid-century year of diminishing hope as one environmental promise after another was left adrift.
The ball glitch was soon forgotten in favour of indiscriminate kissing and wild dancing in the streets. Emily hardly missed a step until a youngish man in a silver cape and a frosty green face stumbled directly into her and would have fallen if she hadn’t grabbed on and steadied him. Must be Jack Frost, she giggled to herself as the young man hurried away. Where else but New York, Emily thought, could you cross paths with someone who sounded like a witch, a Santa lookalike and a stumbling Jack Frost?
“Thank you, Sis,” the man shouted back as he turned around, waved goodbye to Emily and quickly disappeared into the crowd. Emily turned back toward her parents and smiled again.
As expected, there was much consternation and after-the-fact complaints about the ball glitch but for Emily, at least, it was beyond special just to be there when the ball didn’t actually drop all the way down. That’s never happened before, she realized, what a great subject for show-and-tell’ at school. And to that end she took countless pictures to show and tell the other kids: one of her and the ball, her and the clock, Mom and the ball, Dad with each and each with the others.
At the time, Emily was not much older than a failing robin, just twelve years and a bit but, sadly, as much as she tried to be sprite and bubbly most of the time, she wasn’t that well inside and hadn’t been, off and on, for some years. But lately the dreaded asthma attacks were becoming too frequent, taking more of her breath away than before. She likened her own circumstance to that of the planet which, by the year 2050, was wheezing its way through another orbiting of the sun.
The Doctor back home was not as hopeful as Emily’s mom and dad made him out to be but Emily was not fooled, not for a moment. She knew the odds, as oddly unfair as they were, but to Emily’s credit she had learned from years of practice to make the most of every day.
The adults at home in Mushaboom thought Emily was the most courageous Mushaboomian ever, having to live with sickness and hardly ever complaining. “I’m not courageous, not really,” Emily told her best friend, Sandy. “You’re the courageous one, never afraid to ask a boy or a girl for a dance. And remember that time you corrected the teacher; that was courageous!”
Mushaboom and New York City were as different to Emily as a pea is to an apple. One, by comparison, is smaller than usual for a pea and the other, much bigger than expected for an apple. Emily’s Mushaboom was a quiet place where News was too commonly known to be new to anyone. She liked it that way, people greeting each other and sharing what they had. But that aside, Emily was strangely attracted to New York City, a nail to a magnet.
“Mom, there’s something about the Big Apple that makes me hungry, like I belong here. Let’s come back again real soon, like maybe on my birthday?”
“We’ll see dear, but don’t forget we’re still here in New York and there’s a full day left for more sightseeing tomorrow.”
Emily enjoyed it all. She liked the awesome feeling of being miniature when looking up at a skyscraper. She liked the flashing neon signs, the very yellow taxies and Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not. She even enjoyed the hockey game at Madison Square Gardens with Dad, not to mention the Fashion Walking Tour with her and Mom on the lead and Dad lagging behind.
But most of all and stranger than fiction, Emily was captivated with stories of how New York City, once a world leader in the despicable act of littering had, by its own hand, spruced itself up as spotlessly as a stray cat in a new home.
Since turning ten Emily had collected newspaper clippings about the New York City makeover; articles on everything from how the city had hired the homeless as street cleaners to how graffiti and garbage were removed from the subways. Not too many twelve-year-olds if any, even knew about the clean-up that happened there back in the 1990’s, but Emily did. I’m coming back here someday, asthma or not, Emily decided while riding the subway for the first time. That day was to come much sooner than she or her parents could have imagined.
Home again in Mushaboom, Emily was upstairs bundling clothes for the laundry when something resembling an ice cube fell from a coat pocket and onto the floor. She bent down and picked it up. It felt smoother than an avocado nut, icy cold and yet warm to the touch at the same time.
She rubbed the cube like Aladdin had once done with that lamp of his and she made a wish, although no genie came out to offer one. When just about ready to put it under her pillow for good luck, the cube suddenly melted in the palm of her hand, leaving but one tiny drop of green. A blink later and that too was gone.
“Yikes! What was that?” Emily said out loud.
“What are you mumbling about, dear?” came her mother’s voice at the bedroom door. Emily looked up and was just about to mention the cube when, on second thought, it was too unbelievable for words. Instead, out came, “Nothing Mom, just talking to myself.”
Later that evening Emily was in the kitchen dipping hot buttered toast in a bowl of half-melted ice cream, her favourite snack before bedtime. Between bites she thanked her parents profusely for the wonderful trip to the Big Apple. “It’s off my bucket list for now,” she announced while putting the dishes in the sink. “But someday soon, I’m going back to New York. I just know it. I just know it,” she said again and again on her way upstairs to bed. Before the moon could even find Emily’s bedroom window through the dense clouds, she’d fallen fast to sleep.
“I’d take her back to New York every week if that would help,” her dad whispered to mom. “She hasn’t been this excited since the day we took her to the Ice Palace in Quebec City. She slept there in that icy room like it was home on the range. Who knows, maybe the excitement of New York will last forever and keep her well.”
“I sure hope so,” mom prayed while fluffing-up the cushions on the sofa. “It’s all we can do for now but don’t forget dear, as I keep reminding myself, Emily’s a special child. She surprises me all the time. Remember when she was only eleven months old, how she got up by herself and walked for the first time?”
“I’ll never forget that,” dad said with a big smile. “She walked perfectly upright over to that chair and picked up a bar wrapper and put it in the garbage. She was hardly speaking more than a word at a time but I’m as sure as certain she said, ‘Don’t litter’. You heard it, remember?”
“I certainly did and I’d swear to it as well but who’d believe it? Like I said, Emily’s a special child.”
