Blocking Time
I never had proper Lego sets as a kid.
Now, I don’t mean that any other way than literally. Growing up in the toy-mad 1980s, my brother and I were not deprived: we had practically everything else.
Wooden blocks, bristle blocks, dominos, Capsela, Construx were among the multiple building toys littering the carpets of our basement playroom and every available surface in our bedrooms. Solo, we made them into fleets, villages, castles. Paired with G.I.Joe and Transformers and Star Wars, they expanded playtime beyond the premade sets in those toy lines and into something uniquely multiverse, our very own.
The closest I came to Lego was a basic set of generic set of Loc Blocs, circa 1981 and my 5th birthday.
Loc Blocs didn’t trouble you with step-by-step instruction booklets, or stickers, or yellow-faced figures. There were no superhero-movie tie-ins.
All they required was your time and imagination. And that, I had plenty of.
I assembled houses and animals and vehicles out of my own head. Eventually, I developed my own go-to template for a robot I could rearrange blocks to transform into a spaceship.
The coolest feature I concocted was a cockpit that doubled as an escape pod. It had a single, black 1×1 round block as pilot’s chair, with a blue panel on the side as one set of controls, and yellow in front as another. The space directly in front of the seat, of course, was empty, since Loc Blocs made no character figures to occupy it. All the better: that was space was for projecting tiny, imagination me!
The Kids’ Legos are All Right
I made it out of the 90s without paying too much attention to Legos. It wasn’t until the 2010s, with our two oldest sons flinging wooden blocks and cars and stuffed animals everywhere, that we discovered how fun the dang things could be.
Early sets were of the dinosaur or car variety, with not too much assembly required. Though I started to enjoy that aspect of it, as much as I guess my own dad got into assembling our G.I. Joe vehicles and slot car sets. I think there’s something more at play there than rediscovering the joys of your childhood. Since nearly all parenting comes without a clear finish line, not to mention instruction manual, having a reliable beginning and reaching a verifiable, joyful end with the assembled kit looking pretty much like the box and the kids off to enjoy it for a while is a pretty satisfying accomplishment.
When Ninjago and its tie-in TV series first came along, I admit my jaundiced, Gen-X sensibilities were only grudgingly engaged by all the references to Star Wars and Karate Kid and oodles of other nods to parents as this new Lego sensation launched. Was the TV-series the tie-in, or the toy? I should have noticed all the figurative dollar signs swooping around and ran white-knuckled away, clutching my wallet. But hey, after all, I was raised in the 80s and well inured to my duties as a passionate consumer.
The kids ate it up. And we encouraged them, to the untidy tune of uncounted pounds of cardboard set boxes and figures and sets assembled and unassembled occupying every available corner of playroom and bedroom space. It was at least familiar territory.
The kids got to be connoisseurs enough they’d research vintage Ninjago sets from years before bearing price tags in the hundreds and “yeah-right” availability and thoughtfully, innocently pen them to their Christmas wish lists. Not exactly thrilled with their niche fandom, but a big believer in holiday mind-blowing nonetheless, for a few Christmases I designated one mega set for purchase. Jonah got the Lego Ferris Wheel, first; then Ben and Caleb the Ninjago Destiny’s Bounty pirate ship.
For those first mega sets, I was able to reprise my role from their pre-Lego-expert days, taking charge of the hundreds-of-pages-long instructions and supervising the build, hands-on, through at least a few days and up to a week of assembly. There was the usual, satisfying rush. But before long, with playtime imitating, or in this case predicting real life, the boys didn’t need my building prowess, only my buying. They were off and assembling their own kits just fine, thank you.
Lego My Me Time
So a couple Christmases back, I turned my sharp eye for buying Legos on sets for my wife and I. For her, the Lego Friends Central Perk set. For me, a sweet 1960s Ford Mustang. These sets, like the Ferris Wheel, were part of Lego’s annual wave of Ideas and Creator releases, which are aimed at adults and teens and packed with details by turns realistic and whimsical.
In the Ideas series, the sets are even designed and submitted for approval by fans, which carries just enough of a whiff of my Lock Bloc-Capsela-Construx-Wooden Blocks originality to lend it the kind of cred that makes it OK that I invest the cash and the time to assemble them, dutifully, brick by brick by brick.
That first Mustang set warmed me in the bitterly sub-zero days between Christmas and New Years as the kids did their own thing and I balanced my scotch as I squinted through hundreds of steps. Once completed, I set it on the left side of my nightstand, where it doubled as a place to set my glasses while sleeping or during workouts.
I followed up the Mustang with a Porsche 911 set as an Olathe Marathon completion reward. The wife and kids picked it up at Legoland Kansas City as I soaked my aching muscles in the hotel room. This one took a little longer to build in the middle of Fall, sans vacation time, but that only stretched the pleasure of the step-by-step realization of an automotive icon, one that now is parked on my desk at work.
Now, the kids will note that the sets Dad has chosen, including this Christmas’s A-Frame Cabin, tend to mirror my other old-man obsessions, which include designing and racing cars on X Box’s Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon games, and building endless cabins and castles and houses in their Minecraft worlds. Hey, at least I’ve avoided commemorating my work trips with a Chinese junk or London bus, or my astronomy hobby with the Apollo lander and Saturn V rocket sets. (Though these are on my list. Shhhhhh.)
The upside of all this building, even as the corners of our master bedroom and family room and TV room and office get taken over by more Legos, is an activity that keeps our fingers nimble and minds sharp. So says the NIH and countless other sources regarding jigsaw puzzles and older adults. But puzzles are lame. So we can just take Lego’s non-consumer-fueled word for it, right?
Well, maybe. Since an A-Frame cabin or spiffy London bus fire up my imagination a lot more than a $5 Kodak puzzle at the drugstore. Though I gotta say: if I made a regular habit of this, what I look at as a budget way of enjoying that midlife crisis roadster or lakeside cabin instead of ponying up the cash in real life may not turn out to be such a bargain at all.
But when it comes to our toys, we sacrifice, yeah? That’s my story anyway, and I’ll stick like a brick right to it.
Even Lego Needs a Montage
Enjoy this series of start-to-finish shots from my entirely pleasurable assignment as chief contractor of the Lego A-Frame cabin.
Dadsense 