Legos

Every city needs an organization to patrol the streets and space. It's actually written into Legoland charter.

As an adult, I miss playing with Legos. And 7-year-old me is probably not too excited that I stopped.

Legos were one of the most played with toys in my house as a kid and we had a ton of them. This was in part due to my uncle from Germany buying us a set every year for a long time (and the range of sets were always a little strange, like the gas station, the space police jail ship and medieval castle), and my dad having some larger sets of his own that we were not supposed to touch (but most definitely did). At the height of our playing with Legos, we had built two or three towns worth of buildings, space ships and almost two police stations to every three “bad guys.” It was a world of multi-colored imagination that only ceased to grow when we ran out of basic building blocks, which was more often than not.

Looking back, I think one of the things that made Legos so great for us as a family is that we could all play. We even had some “girls” sets for my sister, which I remember contained a little Lego horse and pink bricks. Not that those stayed in one piece for longer than an afternoon because we rarely built according to the packaging, or at least never kept by-the-directions creations together for long periods of time.

But like many things, my desire to play with Legos stopped as I grew older. At least for short period of time. You see, for as much as the older three children in my family were Lego builders, it was my youngest brother who took it to a new level. Like his older brothers and sister, he built a town, complete with a hospital, a city garage and a Jedi Council building, but he never tore them down for the next big project. His city seemed to have lasted for close to a decade, always moving from table to table as it grew bigger and bigger. And the nice thing about his building the town? I was able to play with Legos again.

Sadly, those days of his town have probably come to a close. Even a few summers ago when I came back from college, he would spend hours in my parent’s basement building the sprawling town but he’s a teenager now and I have a feeling his once sprawling city scape is in disrepair and probably slowing coming apart as the basement’s contents get rearranged.

At the very least, I can take pride in all of those multi-colored memories and remember the countless hours I spent in the living room trying to collect all of the Legos from the red carpet so people wouldn’t find a 1x1x3 red brick in the bottom of their foot (this was mitigated by eventually moving the collection to the basement, although that was well into my youngest brother’s tenure of play). I can fondly keep those memories of creating whole worlds with my siblings, which will probably be one of the best I have of each of them. It was when we were at our most creative, and that is a thought I never wish to lose.

So, for not growing up to be a multi-color architect, with a love of putting lasers on almost everything, I apologize to 7-year-old me for not still being a Lego Maniac. But hopefully I’ll get the chance to one day get my kids addicted to building Legos, at least until we run out of basic blocks.