'Toy Story 3' brings back some memories

Disney/Pixar has a way of tugging at my heartstrings – and they did it yet again with “Toy Story 3.” And I’m not the only one who feels that way. I saw “Toy Story 3” with my family over the weekend – as did several of my coworkers. I asked one of them – a male colleague – if the movie brought him to tears and he said, “I was choked up a few times.”

Though “Toy Story 3” is a kids’ movie, it is one that will resonant with many adults. While it’s been years since I packed up my own stuff to head off to college, like Andy does in the movie, I have some vivid recollections of trying to decide what to take and what to leave behind. There were things I knew had to come along – the CD binder full of music (back in the days before iPods) and a Sony discman to play them on. I had a pile of carefully selected videotapes to keep my roommate and I entertained, among them “Interview with the Vampire,” “Wings of Desire” and “Reality Bites,” just a few of my favorites at the time. I even had a plastic storage bin full of school supplies and other necessities that one of my aunt’s gave me as a graduation gift.

But some of the most important things I brought along weren’t really necessities and were more to offer a sense of comfort away from home. I brought a stuffed turtle my friends and I won at the Santa Cruz Beach and Boardwalk one summer a few years before. We’d spent all kinds of money playing games in the arcade just to get enough tickets to win the turtle. My best friend and I had traded off keeping it at our houses for a while, joking that we were sharing joint custody. But it went to me for that first year of school.

I also brought along the baby blanket my grandmother had made for me when my mom was pregnant. My grandmother died when I was 2 ½ years old so the blanket was always the one thing that made me feel connected to her. My mom told me the story of when she was pregnant with my sister – she sent me to Reno with my aunts will she was in the hospital recovering from a cesarean. My dad had to work so there was no one to watch me at night so my aunts took me along on their trip.

On the way home, they realized that they had forgotten my blanket in the hotel room. They were already across the California border when they turned around and headed back to Reno for it. When they arrived, housekeeping had already laundered it and folded it up in case someone returned for it. So in a lot of ways the blanket was also a reminder that my family, immediate and extended, would always be willing to drive miles out of their way for me. By the time I went to college, the blanket was ratty and torn along the edges, but I kept it folded up on the bottom of my dorm-room bed.

The last thing I packed was a photo album with pictures of all my best high school friends to keep on my dorm room desk. Now, again, this was in the time before digital cameras and social networking sites so the pictures felt like they were worth a lot because I had to pay for the film and to have them developed – and their was limited space in the album so I had to pick and choose the best ones to keep with me. The album included pictures from trips to the Boardwalk and the beach; the 17-mile drive and Monterey Bay Aquarium, pool parties at one of my best friend’s houses and just snapshots at school.

It was a small photo album that could be easily packed up with me and it became the album that I kept with me through moves, new jobs and graduate school. I even took it with me when I studied overseas. I added in photos of my college friends through the years and my first boyfriend; pictures of my best mates in Ireland, including my coulda-woulda-shoulda guy; photos of the friend who helped me make it through graduate school and then who dropped out after the first year, but not before scoring me a picture of the super hot bartender from our favorite bar – who turned out to have been married all along.

The thing that really got to me about “Toy Story 3” is that the packing up and moving on never really gets any easier than it was on the first move away from home. In some ways, that was the easiest move because I was still young and sure of where my life was headed, and I have a naïve belief that my best friends would always be my best friends. It’s always hard to decide what items to pack up and take along, but I think now the hardest part is the people that are left behind. I’m old enough now to know that it is really hard to keep in touch with people who live halfway across the world or even just in another county.

I still keep in touch with friends from high school, from college, from Ireland and from graduate school, but in a lot of ways it’s never quite the same as when we were immersed in a situation where we spent most of our waking moments together.