Mark KennedyLast Sunday, my family saw the thought-provoking new Pixar movie "Inside Out."
Before we left home, I stuffed my pockets full of Kleenex - ostensibly for my pollen allergies, but honestly because I had heard that the movie causes some daddies to fog up their 3-D glasses.
Meanwhile, I noticed my 13-year-old son on the couch looking at me with a mischievous half-smile on his face.
"What are you smiling about," I said. "Is it the Kleenex?"
"Nothing," he said, looking away.
"Tell me," I demanded.
"It's nothing," he insisted, as his smile spread.
I reached down and goosed his kneecap and he kicked at me with his left foot.
It was the Kleenex, of course.
If you're 13, discovering that your Dad is "making preparations" to cry at a Disney movie probably falls somewhere between disturbing and hilarious. But I was so glad that he was willing to join the family on this outing, I didn't press the issue.
If you haven't seen "Inside Out," you should know it's getting great reviews. It had a 98 percent positive rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website the last time I looked. It helps that most movie reviewers are adults. No kid has ever walked out of a movie theater saying: "Wow, that was thought-provoking cinema."
My teenage son - who enjoys Mad Max movies - thought "Inside Out" was boring, and he pretended to sleep through the last half-hour. Meanwhile, my 8-year-old son freaked out when I started crying and hopped into mommy's lap.
Why did I cry? Because I'm a big, blubbery sentimentalist. Any movie about kids outgrowing their parents slays me. For the record: I cried watching "Toy Story 3," too, when Andy went off to college and left Woody and the other toys behind.
"Inside Out" is about what goes on inside the mind of an 11-year-old girl named Riley. When her dad gets a new job in San Francisco, Riley leaves her safe cocoon of hockey games and Midwestern winters and experiences a completely new environment in California, where they do weird things like put broccoli on pizzas.
Much of the movie is set inside Riley's brain where her emotions - joy, fear, disgust, anger and sadness - take turns operating the joy stick that controls her life. In Brain World, precious core memories are guarded like magic marbles, childhood imaginary friends whimper like lost pets, and a "Train of Thought" chugs from here to there with no particular destination.
The emotions - each embodied by an animated character - strive to preserve Riley's comforting core memories from the ravages of early-onset adolescence. The moral of the movie is that the character Sadness, who Joy is always trying to cheer up, is actually a necessary emotion that holds everything together. After all, we cry today because we want to feel happy tomorrow.
The scene that triggered my emotions involves a character named Bing Bong, Riley's old imaginary friend. Bing Bong wanders through the long corridors of Riley's mind, hoping he will one day get a call from his long-lost pal.
As the plot unfolds, Joy falls into an abyss reserved for disposable memories and it's Bing Bong who helps her get out, using a flying wagon with broom handles for jet engines. It's the same wagon that he and Riley used during their imaginary games years when she was a pre-schooler.
It reminded me of the Baby Boy stories I used to tell my older son when he was little. Every night at bedtime, I would concoct a Baby Boy story that invariably involved them both flying to the moon while riding bottle rockets left over from the Fourth of July.
As Bing Bong helped rescue Joy to save Riley from adolescent angst, my shoulders began to shake and I fished a tissue out of my pocket. Sobbing softly, I reached over in the theater and rubbed the neck of my 13-year-old son, who was pretending to sleep in the seat next to me.
"How'd you like the movie?" I asked as we left the theater.
He rolled his eyes.
The next day, though, he told me at least five times that he loves me. And he gave me hugs that were at least a half-beat longer than usual.
Asleep, huh? Boring movie, huh?
I love you, too, baby boy.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6645. Follow him on Twitter @TFPCOLUMNIST. Subscribe to his Facebook updates at www.facebook.com/mkennedycolumnist.