LEGO Read Free

wouldn’t hold or the building would somehow have fallen from the workbench and smashed on the floor. I don’t know if my dad was nervous, I just know that he didn’t say anything either before turning on the light in his workshop.
    The light caught the glossy black paint first—a shining monolith in a dusty basement. It stood eighteen inches tall—a jutting series of rectangles that from across the room looked like a building, not a collection of LEGO bricks.
    “It came out nice, Davey,” said my dad, using an affectionate nickname that was short for my middle name.
    “Thanks, Dad,” I said.
    It was one of the happiest moments of my childhood, though I didn’t realize it then. But one rarely recognizes the memories that will last at the time.
    Over the next two years, I gradually began to let go of my interest in LEGO. This was my time for oversize tortoiseshell eyeglasses and Benetton sweatshirts with prominent cartoon bears—in short, I made a lot of poor choices. My uncle bought us an eight-bit Nintendo system for Hanukkah one year, and I stopped building spaceships in order to battle Koopa. I was a soccer goalie until the goalposts were increased to regulation size in fifth grade, leading me into a six-year dalliance with musical theater. I flirted with a lot of new loves. And by the time I kissed my first girlfriend, the blue LEGO tub had been left to slumber in the closet.
    I had entered what is known to adult fans of LEGO as the Dark Ages, the period of time when you don’t play with LEGO bricks. Millions of children are entering the Dark Ages right now. Most never reemerge. Our LEGO bricks are sold at garage sales or are left in those plastic buckets in the closets of our childhood homes. It’s a phenomenon that even the corporate executives at the LEGO Group have recognized by actively separating their community relations efforts into two categories: people over and people under the age of thirteen. I let go a year too soon, and I probably was a few years late in getting back.
    But you never completely leave LEGO bricks behind. How could you, when LEGO products are sold in 130 countries, when there are roughly sixty-two LEGO bricks for every person on the planet? LEGO has seeped into every element of our popular culture. Nintendo sells LEGO Star Wars, Batman, and Indiana Jones-themed video games. Michel Gondry used LEGO bricks in a stop-motion animation music video that helped launch the career of the White Stripes. The LEGO collection is even on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where it is celebrated as a dramatic accomplishment in design.
    Over the past two decades, there have been small signs that my interest in LEGO was returning. I have sought compromises, like a binging dieter. A hooded sweatshirt adorned with a LEGO cowboy hangs in my closet. It’s a recent addition to my wardrobe, discovered at a LEGO retail store in a New Jersey mall, where I decided that an adult sweatshirt—not toys—was the socially acceptable purchase. LEGO men—snuck into my pocket while cleaning out my childhood closet—hide like garden gnomes in my office. But it wasn’t until I was preparing to move with my wife, Kate, from Brooklyn to Kansas City that I was struck by what I was leaving behind. My mom asked me to drive out to Fairfield, Connecticut, to clean out the closet of my childhood bedroom before I left for the Midwest, and it was then that I came across the blue plastic bucket with my name on it.
    “Those are your LEGOs—you can’t give those away. You loved them,” said my mom.
    I promised I would keep them for her as yet unborn grand-children, and she left me to finish my task. I reached to the back of the closet where the Sears Tower still sat, diorama-style, in a blue shoebox. I picked it up.
    Seeing the tower after all those years made me realize that I still do love LEGO. I love it for all those things I built, but also for what it meant to build things with my dad. That tower