David: LEGOs

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Outside of video games (I've been fascinated with watching pixels move as I push buttons since my family got a Magnavox Odyssey2, which means as long as I can remember) my favorite toys when I was a kid were my LEGOs. They were a hodgepodge of various themed sets mixed in with some basic sets and carried about, along with various building instructions, in a plastic blue box resembling a briefcase. If I was going to be visiting a place away from home for any length of time, my LEGO case was sure to come along.

I remember building, tearing down, and rebuilding the same models over and over and over again. For me, the finished product was fairly boring and the creative possibilities held little appeal. What did it for me back then was following the directions. LEGO instructions were my gateway to technical drawings and fed my fascination for how things were put together. To me they were like reading the step by step instructions to a magic trick (incidentally my home town's public library may still have some magic books in the juvenile section with my name scrawled on the card).

Over time I aged out of my LEGO days. Video games were getting easier to come by, and comic books were beginning to pique my interests. However I've checked in on the LEGO aisle many times over the years. You know, just to see how things were doing.

At the age of 19 I began dating my then future wife and quickly became "Uncle" David to her 2 nieces and a nephew. While shopping for their birthdays and Christmas I was often tempted to buy a set of LEGOs, even though they were never on the list of things they wanted or needed. What I really wanted was an excuse to play with the bricks, ostensibly with the kids. LEGOs never made the cut, however, and I was left without a fix.

Flash forward 12 to 13 years later and I finally got my chance to buy LEGOs, this time for my daughter. (In case you're wondering, LEGO DUPLO do NOT count). These were girlie LEGOs, no way around that. They're from the "Friends" series, and you can say what you want about gender bias but my daughter loves them. We sat down together with the set she got for her last birthday and put together what is basically a LEGO dollhouse. I helped a little, but it was mostly all her. It was a mini-LEGO fix.

Yesterday, however, was different. Yesterday we took our 4 year old son to LEGOLAND. The attraction itself is pretty neat, but the best part for me was that it emptied into a big LEGO store. I made a bee-line to the Star Wars section and, after realizing that the Millennium Falcon might be a little too advanced at this point, son and I settled on the Jedi Interceptor. Little did I know then my son and I were a match made in LEGO heaven.

We got home and immediately opened the box and got started. For a 4 year old, he impressed me with his ability to interpret the LEGO instructions, and with just a little bit of help from me he began assembling the model. About 3 pages in, though, something beautiful happened. He picked up the Anakin minifigure with his lightsaber and told me he wished the ship was done so he could play with it. "Don't you want to build the ship?" I asked, greedily hoping for the answer I eventually got. "No I want to play with Anakin and Artoo while I wait for you to build it."

Euphoria.

I finished the ship, mainlining that old drug and loving every second of it, and handed it over to the boy. You see, he didn't get a set of LEGOs. He got a spaceship.

The LEGOs were for me.

Archimago - ()

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