When I was a kid, Legos were quite possibly my number one toy. Sure, I spent untold hours in front of our 13 channel Sony Trinitron with a gray plastic controller in my hand exploring pixelated worlds on my Nintendo Entertainment System, but it was the Legos that best stirred my imagination. It was the Legos that were everywhere.
That’s just what Jonathan Glancey of The Guardian captured in an article last week in which he wrote about the resilience of the toys, of their persistence, the way Lego
“seems to breed in boxes tucked under beds or in the recesses of spidery cupboards. It’s a game that generations add to. And one that children and grandparents can enjoy. From the child’s viewpoint, Lego is simply there, like St Paul’s Cathedral (a bit tricky to model in right-angled plastic bricks), the Empire State Building or St Catherine’s College.”
Last weekend, in between an afternoon in Santa Barbara with former colleagues of mine from the Pacific Coast Business Times and an evening with a freelancer who wrote for me when I edited the Ventura County Reporter , I passed a night at my childhood home. I arrived at my mom’s in the early evening. She was out watching a close friend perform in a play. A houseguest staying over while completing a residency at one of the city’s hospitals was also out. I had the house to myself.
Much as i might have done returning home from school, I dropped a bag off in my bedroom — now painted a rather cheerier color than it ever was during my childhood — and walked straight to our family room. That room really hadn’t changed much in the 11 years since I graduated high school and wandered out into my life.
Sprawled across the coarse carpet of mottled dark and light greens were winding feet upon feet of wooden train tracks assembled by my three-year-old niece more than a month earlier. I smiled, both at the reminder of how the frenetic pace of my family’s life sometimes keeps such clutter unchecked, and at the memory of spending a lazy holiday weekend playing with my niece.
She enlisted me in building an elaborate network of railroad tracks and bridges and boat docks. Nearby, the surprisingly elaborate complex of building blocks she had constructed still stood. Wrought by her own imagination and design it looked like a modern civic center any city would be proud of. I smiled at how she had determinedly created her own world that weekend (my only role was to take instruction from my young forewoman and occasionally solve vexing engineering struggles such as the proper support for a railway bridge).
Continue reading “Rearranging Our Pieces, Playing With Our Future”
