DADWAGON

Just came back from my usual thrice-a-week run, from my apartment up to Prospect Park, around the loop, and back. Weather was cool, I made decent time, and I felt great—until I got back. That’s because, as I walked through the housing project across the street from my apartment, I was, well, I guess you’d say accosted by one of the teenagers hanging out in front of the projects. He motioned for me to take off my headphones, and when I did, he said, quietly, “Give me all you got in your pockets.”

He had two friends with him, both of them leaning against the railings on the sides of the path.

“I got nothing in my pockets,” I said, continuing to walk. Which was true. I don’t carry much when I run.

“What about that?” he said, gesturing at the iPod Nano strapped to my arm. “You’re gonna get beat up, right now.”

“You’re joking,” I said, and walked past him, putting my hand on his shoulder as I did.

He didn’t do anything. His friends made sounds like they were amused at his chutzpah. I took a few more steps and called over my shoulder, “You’re funny, man!”

Two minutes later, I was through my gate, and shaking a little. I mean, this wasn’t my first mugging (attempted or actual, though this was my first in NYC), and wasn’t that different from the other times (I usually don’t have anything worth taking). And, fine, I know it’s the projects, and I don’t even mind kids messing around a little. They’re teenagers—they’re going to be jerks.

But there’s another thing: These projects are getting worse. Last weekend, there were three or four gunshot incidents, and a few weeks before that a 16-year-old girl was shot to death right on my block. So: How seriously am I supposed to take this shit today? Do I call the cops on these kids, or will that start the kind of war I don’t want to deal with? (I run through there frequently, and hell, I live across the street from this fucking place!) But the fact is, I don’t want to have to put up with this attitude, and no one else should have to, either.

As I run through the possibilities in my mind, I think of how the Brownstoner commenter crowd would react. “Fuck you, gentrifier, you moved to Brooklyn” is what they’d probably say, and I understand that. It wasn’t like I expected garlands of flowers to be spilling from the towers. But I live here, I’ve got a kid here, and there’s at least a dozen more very young kids on my block alone. I don’t want to have to tell Sasha (when she’s older) not even to walk through the projects to get from one place to another. And I don’t want to move—I love my block, with its trees and families and peaceful atmosphere only occasionally disrupted by violence. But I don’t want to get robbed, don’t want to get shot, and don’t want to feel like an asshole. So: What the fuck do I do?

Pixar’s Toy Story 3, which I took the kids to see this weekend, does not lack for praise. Richard Corliss, a serious and sober reviewer at Time, called it an “instant classic.” I know this because the Daily Herald wrote a whole piece about all the (clichéd) superlatives chasing the movie.

The third Toy Story film, it catches up with Woody, Buzz, and his other animated toy-friends as they cope with the fact that their owner, Andy, has grown up and doesn’t need them anymore. It’s emotionally rich material, mined well by the film. And the action sequences are pretty fantastic. So my qualitative review is: go see it. We paid $50 for a family of four for our tickets—popcorn not included—and it might have actually been worth it (although if you bring a 2-year-old to the 3D version, as I did, expect him to be a little startled at first, and then, 10 minutes in, quite bored with wearing the 3D glasses).

That’s the good news. The bad news, especially for New Yorkers living in cramped quarters, is that this is basically a movie about how you should never ever throw your toys out, because they have beautiful and easily wounded little souls.

Toy Story 3, like any well-told tale, corners you into identification and sympathy with the protagonist’s worldview. And in this case, the good guys’ living nightmare is the prospect of being sent to the dump. They are plastic toys, mind you, but they yearn to stay in Andy’s house forever, even if that means living in a box in the attic.

To be honest, that’s distressing for me not just because I’m now a Manhattanite whose children were born without an attic, or even closets. It’s distressing because it strikes me as an oddly pro-hoarding message. OK, I know, it’s a total buzzkill to link Toy Story 3 to a serious psychological disorder. But have you seen A&E’s Hoarders or TLC’s Hoarding: Buried Alive? Hoarding is no joke, and it’s not that rare—without bumming you and myself out with the details, let’s just say there’s a fairly vibrant strain of this disorder alive among my relatives. My own clutter issues, according to the International OCD Foundation’s Clutter Image Rating, are “subclinical,” thankfully, but I’ve got loved ones who can’t even use half their house because it’s stacked to the ceiling with junk, each mildewed item imbued with some meaning or the other.

I’ve tried to help in the past, to little avail. I worry that it’s somehow genetic and that my children will end up with the same psychoses. So I’ve tried hard to understand the mindset, the suffocating overdose of sentiment, that can attach a person so tightly to so much stuff. But it wasn’t until Toy Story 3 that I ever saw the world so clearly from a hoarder’s perspective. These plastic gew-gaws are, in the Toy Story world, a completely acceptable vessel for the intense emotions of childhood. There’s no mediation of that idea at all—nobody suggests to Andy that he should have thrown those toys out or donated them long ago, that it’s somewhat pathological to invest so much emotion in objects new or old.

It won’t spoil the plot to say that donating the toys to a daycare center—which in the real world would be a great idea—becomes a nightmare for the sensitive toys involved, and that the real payoff only comes when Andy looks for a truly unique and special home for Woody, Buzz, the Slinky-dog, the piggy bank and other playthings. There are many inflections of OCD and hoarding, but among the delusions that bedevils one of my relatives the most is that same idea: that she’s only keeping these books, manuals, VHS cassettes, broken tape recorders, etc. until she can find the right person to give them to, someone to whom they would finally be more than trash.

That’s a fine idea if you’re dealing with one item, or five. But in the case of most hoarders, it’s thousands. And maybe it’s just my warped perspective on this, but I have a hard time believing that Andy—a 17-year-old now—would keep an entire chest full of little-kid toys in an otherwise clean, uncluttered room. It just seems that if he kept the mementos of his preschool and elementary school years within such easy reach, he would have also kept mementos from middle school and high school as well: yearbooks, board games, erector sets, track shoes, trophies, love letters, prom boutonnieres. In short, his room would have to be a mess of tilting piles of memory-infused trinkets.

And if that’s what it was, from the outset the audience would have been shouting what I felt like shouting: Andy, for the love of God, just throw away the toys already and start living.

Over at the BBC, Andrew Martin, presenter of the documentary “Disappearing Dad,” looks at the world of fiction and realizes that, when it comes to fathers, there are really only two kinds: bad and dead.

In fact, I have a perfectly good relationship with my dad; it’s just that if a father does play his paternal role correctly, there can be no story. He would, by means of his restraining hand, his wise counsel or financial support, step in to prevent any misadventures occurring. Much better to kill him off in chapter three, as Robert Louis Stevenson does with Jim Hawkins’s father in Treasure Island.

Dad is usually dead in any decent children’s story, whether it be Harry Potter or The Tale of Peter Rabbit, whose father was not only killed but also eaten by Mr McGregor.

He then goes on to trace the current state of fictional fatherhood—i.e., father no longer knows best, probably because he’s dead—to the “youthquake of the 1960s, the rise of feminism, and the culture of ‘cool.'” I don’t know if I entirely buy that, but the whole thing did make me wonder: Is there any good fiction out there—novels or movies—with good fathers?

I’m not talking about the many, many fictions, from Star Wars to Little Children, in which a bad dad turns good in the end. Those follow a pretty typical narrative arc.

What I’m looking for—purely out of curiosity—is a story in which there’s real drama that involves, but doesn’t corrupt, ridicule or treat with kid gloves, a decent father. Anyone got recommendations? Maybe Wall Street? Or is it just better to do away with parents completely?