LEGO (30 page)

I come home from Seattle with a LEGO recycling truck for Kate. I’ve taken to buying her sets when I’m traveling. I am as bad as any father in a cell phone commercial. Only I’m not buying things for my kid—they’re for my wife. I hand her the orange-and-white LEGO recycling truck; it’s roughly the size and shape of my LEGO bus.

“This is sweet,” says Kate, using eighties lingo for approval.

“I thought you would like the recycling truck; this one seemed like it was for eco-conscious adults like you,” I reply.

Kids are the primary audience for LEGO sets, but I wonder about the kid who really wants a LEGO recycling truck for Christmas. You feel like that kid is due for a beating at school. I guess children would like putting the 1 × 1 rounds into the included trash can or the back of the recycling truck. Kate certainly seems to be getting a kick out of it after she’s finished putting together the set. The 206-piece recycling truck isn’t really a challenge, though; her building skills are advancing too quickly.

“Look at the back. This is amazing,” says Kate, opening and shutting the rear storage compartment of the recycling truck.

She hands me the empty cardboard box, and it joins the handful of other LEGO boxes inside the recycling bin on our side porch. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been filling the bin. I wonder what the men who pick up our recycling think about the contents. Do they believe we have a child celebrating a four-week-long birthday party? Or perhaps I’m an extremely specific toy reviewer who happens to live in Kansas City. In reality, I’m the guy who overstuffs his recycling bin and is learning how to share his toys with his wife.

It’s a weird thing to feel proud of your spouse, but I’m glad that she can knock out sets with the same single-minded intensity of a Chinese gold farmer earning virtual tokens for somebody in the World of Warcraft. It’s a good feeling to come home and find her on the couch, the dog sleeping on her blanket-covered legs, with a set of LEGO instructions and storage tubs spread around her in a fan. It makes me think she’ll build LEGO creations with our kids, something that many spouses of AFOLs seem reluctant to do. I can understand if they’re worried that the obsession of their husbands will be transferred to their progeny.

“I have a gift for you,” says Kate. Our fourth anniversary is coming up, and I’ve had a feeling I was getting something LEGO-related since accidentally stumbling upon a package from their distribution facility in Tennessee.

Neither Kate nor I is very good at waiting to give gifts. I often buy her more than one thing at a time, just so I can give one gift early and hold the other back for the actual occasion. I’m not surprised that I’m getting a LEGO product; it’s possible I might have received it even if I had never picked up the hobby. We have a history of giving presents that are meant primarily for children. It goes back to the first gift of our relationship a decade ago. We were apart for the first time; it was winter break from Brown University. Without knowing the other person had bought anything, we sent each other a package. Kate and I had bought each other Marvin’s Magic Drawing Board, a black board that when pressure was applied revealed colors underneath. She had seen an infomercial; I had made an impulse purchase in the airport. It was the opposite of the “Gift of the Magi,” and it was one of the reasons I knew I would marry her.

Kate hands me a LEGO Yoda pen. The Connect & Build pen has a Yoda minifig at the top, along with several colored beads and bricks that can be interchanged. It is not, however, part of the LEGO system—the beads and bricks aren’t uniform. I’m so excited by Yoda that I don’t notice this at first.

“Awesome you are,” I say in the scratchy voice of the tiny green Jedi master. “This is going to be the only pen I take on interviews from now on. And as long as everybody I interview is between six and nine years old, I should have no problems.”

I talk in the Yoda voice until Kate stops laughing. She probably has been humoring me for the last forty-five minutes or so. The Yoda Pen also makes us realize that we both were too attached to oversize or comic pens and pencils in our childhood. I had a large plastic yellow Crayola from the Think Big! store in New York City. Kate, a banker’s daughter, treasured her pen filled with shredded money. So we would have been the kind of kids who were excited to receive a LEGO recycling truck.

As I doodle with the pen, I tell Kate I’m glad she didn’t end up buying me a set of LEGO cuff links, relaying a conversation I had in Billund with Jai Mukherjee, a director with the New Business Group, who works primarily on licensing for LEGO.

“I don’t think everything we do from a licensing perspective has to have a buildable element. Think about it, if you started building in bricks to clothes, it would make it very painful for kids when they play,” he joked.

With his shaved head and glasses, I could have mistaken him for the American tennis player James Blake until I heard his slight British accent and the patter of a brand consultant.

“I think the things we are absolutely rigid on are the values of quality, creativity, and fun. We’ll never compromise LEGO’s quality standards and policy,” said Jai.

To illustrate his point, he grabbed a manila bubble mailer. He shook it, and two cuff links fell into his palm—Darth Vader minifigures glued to silver-colored aluminum backings. I’ve seen the cuff links before on Etsy, an online marketplace for homemade goods. Apparently part of Jai’s job is to keep tabs on the unlicensed products being made from LEGO bricks.

“Would you ever wear this?” asked Jai.

“No, but I’m not a giant Star Wars nerd, contrary to what Jan thinks,” I replied, nodding at Jan Christiansen, who was busy sending a text message.

“Even if you weren’t a giant Star Wars nerd,” said Jai.

“It’s too much. No, I don’t think I could heft those around.”

“I get the basic concept. It’s just the execution. Has anyone ever really tried wearing these?” asked Jai rhetorically.

According to Jai, LEGO licensees sold approximately $400 million worth of LEGO-related goods in 2007. In addition to the popular series of video games, the company has developed a robust clothing and backpack line. There are LEGO-branded school cones in Germany (that function like the pencil case you got on your first day of school in the United States), LEGO interlocking furniture in Europe, and a series of clickable, customizable watches.

“It seems that there are so many different applications of LEGO now, and there are a lot of different opportunities for people to reconnect. How much are you working with adult fans?” I asked Jai.

“We aren’t doing much around adult collectibles. It’s a relatively niche market. For right now, we’ve looked at publishing, starting with the two books released this year,” he replied.

One of those books,
Fifty Years of the LEGO Brick,
is sitting on my desk. With a red cover imprinted with dots to resemble studs, the book covers the history of the company and the development of product lines at LEGO. It has webbed pockets with old advertisements and even a replica of the original LEGO patent filed in Denmark.

The other book is the
LEGO Collector’s Guide,
which details almost every set created since 1958. Each set is ranked on a scale of one to six yellow bricks, based on scarcity. It’s published in German and English, in deference to the two largest markets for the company. The dense eight-hundred-page book, filled with pictures and set descriptions, reminds me of the dog-eared pulp magazines that baseball card dealers would flip through at baseball card shows. The
Collector’s Guide
was even meant to be a collectible in itself, with a premium hardcover edition produced in a limited batch.

 

 

Reading about LEGO has the intended side effect: it makes me want to buy more LEGO sets. It’s a typical Friday night in the suburbs at Home Depot when I ask Kate if we can swing by Kmart, ostensibly to look at storage options for my collection. I’ve outgrown the right half of my desk, and the floor in the third bedroom is beginning to look like a storage unit.

But when I’m in anyplace that sells LEGO sets, I’m drawn to that aisle first. And there it is, the LEGO Creator Stegosaurus—an articulated dinosaur with green and yellow plates and glowing red eyes. I’ve loved dinosaurs basically since birth, and here is a 731-piece set that has alternate builds of a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Pterodactyl. It’s exquisite, but it’s also $44.99.

“I don’t know if we can afford to buy this set,” I say, feeling deflated by the price. The combination of our recent trip to Denmark and a fireplace renovation has me feeling cash-poor. It’s one of my few old-man traits. Even if there is enough in the bank, I still feel I should be saving money after large expenditures.

“We can buy it,” says Kate. I cock my head slightly, an unconscious gesture mimicking our cat, Houdini.

“It’s awesome. How could you not want this? I’ve wanted it since we first saw it at the store in Denmark,” says Kate.

I leave the set on the shelf, but I’m delighted that Kate wants to build it as strongly as I do. I put it in the Christmas folder in my head, where I keep gift ideas. Whenever Kate mentions that she likes something, I store it away so I always have options when it comes time to look for presents.

The store is empty on a Friday night, the buzzing of the fluorescent lights the only sound other than the squeak of our cart’s bad wheel on the linoleum. The toy aisle ends, and we come upon a series of entertainment centers. The shelves seem to be the right width apart, but all of the entertainment centers are too low. I try to imagine myself building on my knees, and it doesn’t seem feasible. Some adult fans, like Wayne Hussey, have talked about putting down a towel or foam mattress pad to make it more comfortable if you’re going to be kneeling for hours.

“I like the shelves, but I’m not sure about everything else,” I tell Kate. She listens impassively, as noncommittal as I am when I’m waiting outside a dressing room for her to show me an outfit.

We look at bookshelves next. The particleboard and wood constructions are too tall or don’t seem strong enough to support the weight of a dozen tubs of LEGO elements.

“Why can’t I find anything that works?” I ask Kate.

“Probably because you don’t know what you want,” she replies. Kate’s right. I don’t know what I want. I’m the Goldilocks of grown men. Some storage bins are too short; other shelves are not deep enough. In my head I’ve invented a modular system of interchangeable squares or rectangles, something that could be updated or changed as my collection grows. It doesn’t really exist. We’ve been inside Kmart for nearly thirty minutes.

Near the back left of the store is the kids’ furniture section. Kate disappears briefly, but I don’t notice. I’m by myself when I see the perfect storage unit. The white metal looks like a baseball rack, but it comes with nine pastel bins the size of shoe boxes. The bins are open, tilted upward. I envision grabbing bricks, and I think it would be the right height for where my arms fall from my five-foot-three-inch frame.

“Kate, I think I found something,” I tell her. “These bins are a great size and I think they could even be swapped out.”

I’m blathering on for close to a minute when I turn around and notice Kate is starting to cry.

“It makes me sad to look at this,” she says.

I feel the hard bite of tears in the back of my eyes, and I blink once while blowing my breath out slowly. I look back at the box I’m holding and notice, for the first time, a smiling blond girl with pigtails in the picture of the product.
This is the best way for me to organize my toys,
she seems to be saying,
but you don’t have kids like me who need to put away their toys.

I’m an asshole. I leave the box on the floor.

“C’mon, we’re going. That one doesn’t work for me,” I say. The emotion that I keep out of my voice leads me to push our cart too strongly, and the locked-up wheel sends it shooting off toward a shelf of children’s coat hangers. We’re surrounded by kid’s items, and have been for at least fifteen minutes. It’s a horror movie for the infertile.

I right the cart, but before I can push it farther, Kate asks the one question I’m not ready to answer.

“What if we never have a baby?”

I take off my Cubs hat and run my hand through my hair. I can feel my heart pulsing my blood.

“We will.” And then I do the one right thing I’ll do all evening: I hug Kate. These are the moments that are hardest for me, when I can’t fix a problem.

“We’re going to have kids, but first we are going to buy that Stegosaurus set.” The words leave my mouth before I know I’m going to say them. Kate smiles weakly and I hold her hand, pushing the cart with my other hand. I don’t know why I’m still pushing the empty cart; I guess I just don’t want to let go of anything right now.

I grab the set and place it in the child seat. That memory will bring a rueful smile later, but for now I’m focused on two things: getting us home and finding a way to pierce my wife’s sadness. While grasping for answers, I still realize that I’m buying LEGO to make Kate and me feel better. It’s become a proxy for conversation. Instead of talking about that empty child seat, we’re just filling it with LEGO sets.

We don’t really talk on the car ride home, but we tear into that LEGO set as soon as we walk in the door to our house. The pieces fly together, but the answers that Kate and I are seeking will not come as quickly.

Kate puts the finishing touches on the Shipwreck Hideout, intently focused on the pirates, lest they try to escape or plunder.