Adventures with Legos
This post was originally a part of the now defunct Somnaplegic blog.
I received my first set of Legos for Christmas the year I was in Kindergarten. It was a big box set of basic bricks with a large green baseplate, trees, and wheels. To say that I loved my Legos would have been an grotesque understatement. I took particular joy in building practical things. Houses, cars, and plazas were my go to projects. When I was especially proud of a creation I would leave it assembled for a few days. One of my favorite things to build was this two story house with a garage on the lower level, where one of my Lego cars fit perfectly.
Most of the time, when I was done, I took everything apart, sorted the bricks by size and color and snapped them together in columns just the right length to fit in my Lego suit case. Special pieces were sorted into the appropriate trays. Everything had a place, and you bet I would notice if even one brick was missing. As new sets were added I would modify the storage mode to accommodate all the pieces while maintaining ORDER.
My husband also spent a lot of time playing Legos as a child. He and his brother would dump all the Legos out on the floor and pick through for the pieces they wanted. Both received Lego sets for birthdays and Christmas and small ones in Easter baskets, so the collection was pretty impressive. When they were done, they used two dust pans to scoop them all up and dump them in a box.
The first time I heard about this I seriously questioned if we could be friends anymore. I believe his reaction was much the same when he heard how I stored my own Legos.
My husband continued buying Legos for himself as an adult. At one point I foolishly showed him that you could purchase vintage sets through eBay. The end result was that I build a 10 foot long, L-shaped shelf in the corner of the dining room of our first apartment, which I painted like the ocean with cloudy sky backdrop and terra firma underneath. All this, so we’d have a place to store all the 80’s and 90’s era Lego sailing ships he acquired.
Once our son was old enough to start playing with Legos my husband dug out a bunch of his old basic sets for the boy to use, and then the Star Wars ships. They both agreed that I was nuts and insisted on dumping Legos everywhere and cleaning them up with dust pans. Just massive piles of undifferentiated Legos. Grey Star Wars triangle sets in with pirate sets in with monorail pieces. GAAAAAAHHHHH!
I still find rogue tiny Lego pieces in hidden nooks and inside and under furniture. For a while, toddler spawn thought it the funniest thing ever to put things inside my shoes, especially tiny Legos.
In the run up to the Christmas my son was four two things happened that came together in an unexpected way. First, my husband started playing Elder Scrolls Oblivion and Fallout 3 and Lego had a big push with the Castle line. This was right on the heels of the success of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and the figures and settings of the Castle line were clearly capitalizing on this with dwarf and ogre figures and a mine cart set up. A couple of years later they would strike deal to make real LOTR sets, but for now, it was the Castle line.
If I’m fussy about putting Legos away my husband is pathological about collecting loot in role playing games. He figured out which items you could find in dungeons and vaults had the best trade in value by weight, maximized his characters abilities and items for carrying large loads, and developed a system for clearing every last item out of every dungeon. This carried on long past the point where his character had more money than he could possibly spend.
I mocked him for this behavior. A LOT.
Of course, I also enabled it by making him a spreadsheet of items and prices and weights. I was attempting to get him to stop taking everything and focus on the best value, but this backfired. He just used it to figure out how many plates and broken rusted swords he could carry in one go.
He also developed an innovative strategy we call, Dead Body Storage [1]. Basically, he would find a fallen enemy near the entrance of a dungeon, dump all the loot he had on him on the body, and then go back into the dungeon for more. Once the entire cave was cleared, he would ferry the loot from the body to his van, I mean shack, down by the river.
To this day, when we want to express that someone is doing something excessive and wasteful we say, “Stop using dead body storage!”
Our four year old son was obviously too young to be playing video games, but our house is small with an open floor plan, so he often sat on the floor playing with Legos while my husband acted out his own person version of Clean Sweep on the dungeons of Tamriel while I made fun of him.
So it’s Christmas and my son gets a couple of really great Lego Castle sets. Then, the day after Christmas my mom and I go buy a bunch more at 70% off clearance. I mean, who can pass up 70% off Legos? Not this lady!
We bring the sets back to the house and my son immediately tears into them. He opens all the packages and starts organizing all the pieces. I think to myself, “Yes! He’s finally getting it. This is how you treat your Legos.”
I leave for a while doing something or other with my mom and we return to the following scene.
My son has extracted all of the minifigs and lined them up in a row on the table, all but one. One figure is off by himself and next to him is a pile including every spear, shovel, helmet, sword, and also, creepily, their little tiny c-shaped yellow hands [2]. My mother is puzzled.
“Don’t you want to build the castle? Why don’t you put all their gear on them?”
I know exactly what he has done.
“COME LOOK AT WHAT YOUR SON DID!”
“I’ve collected all the loot, grandma! This is the Dead Body Storage!”
Husband arrives. He and boy high five.
Grandmother is disturbed and confused.
“THIS IS HOW YOU ARE ALL KILLING ME. BIT BY INSANE BIT! THE LEGO GODS WILL PUNISH YOU IN ANOTHER LIFE!” I pound my fists pointlessly in the air.
“But not today,” husband says, “Today we are victorious gods of scavenging and frugality.”
****
[1] This is not how many bodies you can put in a car trunk, which is how our family rates the capaciousness of vehicles. “Wooo man, that there is a five body trunk!”
[2] He took the HANDS off the mini figs. I cannot express the level of anxiety I have every time I find a disembodied yellow hand roaming loose. My god, what poor little construction worker is missing this very hand! My husband and son call all of those figures, “Luke.”
*This post was originally a part of the now defunct Somnaplegic blog.
