TOY STORY

A dinner plate with a salmon burger on it,

slides out of the open refrigerator, tumbles to the floor, and shatters into five or six jagged shapes.

I stop and consider the mess.

I am stuck. I can't just roll over it (on my new borrowed wheel chair)...
so I call Jackie.

"Jackie, I've had a SMALL little disaster... I broke something, can you come over?"

(I emphasize "small" to make sure she understands this episode won't be a three hour ordeal - like last week when I fell in the bathroom toilet and Jackie wandered around the building looking for someone strong enough to lift me out of it).

"Alright, I'll be right ovah."

Jackie sounds drowsy and hesitant. "Sixty Minutes" is on in the background. It's dinnertime.

As I wait for Jackie, I stare at the broken pieces, the sludge of salmon, on the dirty tile floor.

Above an oily crescent shard, near the doorway,  I fixate on a dirty string (of something); a rotting remnant of spinach or kale? No. It's a gold chain with a pearl. It's Jackie's. She's been missing it for days.

"It's a sign!" Jackie says. "What does it mean, Charlie? This plate was meant to be broken. Everything happens for a reason."

But I'm not able to join in her mystical enthusiasm. I feel weak. I'm hungry. It's difficult to talk. (I'm losing my strength to talk). Jackie requires answers but all I offer are lopsided smiles and and weak nods.  Jackie is carried away by her own charisma so it doesn't seem to bother her.

After Jackie exits, and after I swallow some food, I decide to go to the movies. "Toy Story 3" has rave reviews. I'll wheelchair to 42nd and Eighth for the ten o'clock showing. I buckle the safety belt and begin my sojourn.

As I wheel away from the Hudson east to Time Square, the city becomes sinister.

There's something not right about 42nd Street. It doesn't know what it's supposed to be (anymore).
I wheel past spectacular brand-new (unlit and empty) skyscrapers (condos!) which meet filthy, savage sidewalks, past shady people and the smells of frying pork, the hum of endless air conditioners.

It occurs to me that that whir at night is synonymous (for me) with summer in the city. And this sound is relatively new. That enormous professional roar didn't begin (I would guess) until the seventies. What was the sound of summer in New York in the sixties or fifties?

Wheeling across forty-second street, I sense hundreds of displaced and unhappy ghosts.

_________________

At the theatre, I wait outside. I wait until someone is kind enough to open the doors. Two sets.
I buy a ticket from a machine. I take an elevator to the fifth floor.

"Toy Story Three" doesn't make me tear up. What got to me was darker.
The toys hold hands as they face certain death in a city dump incinerator.

This scene felt brutal. I guess kids and their parent's understand, they expect, that the toys will be rescued, somehow. And of course, they were. But to me, the conventions for expectations (that everything will be okay) have been quietly altered.

I thought, "well this is it for the toys, it's a terrible way to go, but you got to go sometime". Somehow I forgot that they would (of course) be rescued.