Blest Be the Bricks that Bind
My first memory of legos dates back to Mrs. Baird. She was an old church lady who used to keep me from time to time. She had white hair and kept a plastic pail of the big legos in her closet. When she died many years ago, the pail of legos was bequeathed to me, and I kept it reverently like an urn, at least until Thomas got old enough to dump out the contents and all reverence was discarded. Her legos were once again in the hands of a child.
I’ve also kept a big plastic tote of my legos, mostly a jumbled mix of pirate Legos circa the 1990s in storage, waiting for Thomas to get big enough to graduate from the pail of big legos to my tote of little Legos. I gave it to him a few months ago, and have secretly found myself enjoying recreating my lego ships of olden times. We also got Thomas some small sets for Christmas, which, after building, he summarily destroyed with a monster truck and all the blocks made their way into my old plastic tote, young and old blocks intermingling. He rummages through this tote, makes his own creations, smashes them again, so on and so forth.
My wife finds pleasure not in building or smashing but in sorting. It is the strangest thing, but she is the type of person who doesn’t like peas to mix with corn or butter beans on a plate. I’m lucky because she generally brings order to my disorderly life, but occasionally she can go a little overboard, at which point she commandeers the whole dining room for three days in an effort to bring order to the jumbled mix of legos she has spread out over the table.
She had the look of a person obsessed so I didn’t say much. But she also had the look of a person who was enjoying her task, like she was putting together a puzzle (or deconstructing a puzzle?). In any event, she created a Dewey Decimal system for the lego bricks in our house, based on sets, like Pirates or Jurassic Park, and then miscellaneous bricks based on color. They are now all organized in Ziploc bags, in small plastic containers, and stacked on a shelf.
Personally, I don’t think I would have picked color to classify the bricks by—I think I would have chosen brick type—but let’s be honest, I would have never classified or brought order to anything, hence the jumbled mix of legos to begin with.
Build, smash, sort—it takes all kinds. We’re a family of lego lovers, each in our own way.
Chip off the old block.
I always envied my dad, growing up in the 1940s to 50s, when boys were boys and their toys were lethal. Home built steam engines that might scald or explode, rocket motors that could (and did) blow up the shed, Mechano that could be used to construct anything out of strips of fairly sharp metal. I was of the first generation that got plastic toys, and I liked Lego too. Glad to read that it’s still a thing. And pirate Lego? Aarrrrr! to that 🏴☠️