LEGO (31 page)

Not many couples have life-changing moments in Kmart; even Novalee Nation decided to hide out in a Walmart. The next three nights find Kate snapping together the LEGO Stegosaurus. When she finishes, I pick up the set and move it to the bookcase in the living room.

And there it remains on display as a signifier of our decision that Kate didn’t have to be sad and I didn’t have to be frustrated at failing to get pregnant. When there is nothing left to build, Kate and I begin talking about what worries us, what excites us, and what could happen. Talking leads to crying, which leads to laughing. A lot of emotions are inside that Stegosaurus. I don’t know if we’ll destroy it, like the fax machine in
Office Space,
or try to hang on to a set that provided a bridge toward the next phase of our relationship. I suspect it will be lost over time, like most objects.

The Stegosaurus also awakes in me a desire to build more with dinosaurs, especially when I find the DUPLO Tyrannosaurus Rex I bought at LEGOLAND Billund in the back of my dresser. For the first time, I sketch out a rough plan of what I want to build: a mad scientist vignette. When I’m finished, it looks like a three-walled diorama. In the middle of the room, a minifig in a labcoat is experimenting on a skeleton chained to a table. One wall is completely covered in turbines—repurposed LEGO car axles. The Technic motor from a garage sale becomes a gray, monolithic supercomputer.

The focus of the vignette is the left-hand wall where the snout of the Tyrannosaurus Rex appears to be bursting through it. Transparent 1 × 2 bricks surround the hole to give the illusion that the dinosaur is being pulled through the space-time continuum. I even carefully select a minifig head to show surprise on the mad scientist’s face.

I arrange the vignette alongside the Stegosaurus on the bookshelf. The whale, camel, and truck stand next to the LEGO vending machine. I cringe at the idea that all of these will be displayed at our upcoming Halloween party.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to put these away?” I ask Kate, trying to sound as if I’m asking for her benefit rather than to spare myself embarrassment.

“Nope. We’ve worked hard on these, we should show them off,” answers Kate. Her pronoun choice tells me that she is invested: At
least we’re in this together.

Kate wants to build something for the party, so I suggest a square candy dish on a clear baseplate. It’s the first freebuild she has attempted, and I try to be supportive. She builds in rainbow, in part because I don’t have that big a collection of 1-by-bricks and also because she’s just starting out—more worried about finishing than about matching colors.

So I don’t hover over her with suggestions (it’s hard to stop myself). I start piecing together a small 8 × 8 jack-o’-lantern out of orange safety bricks stolen from the LEGO recycling truck and green tiles from a Pick A Brick cup. I’m beginning to see how color differentials can give the appearance of shapes. I use brown bricks at the base to give the pumpkin a round silhouette. It’s a cute little MOC, big enough to hold an unlit tea candle.

About an hour before the party, I’m filling Kate’s LEGO bowl with candy corn. I’m definitely nervous. I haven’t shown what I’ve built to that many people outside the AFOL community.

“Perfect,” I say to Kate, holding up the bowl.

“Really. You think it’s going to hold?”

I nod and place it on the bookshelf. I spend the first part of the party watching people to see if they’re looking at the LEGO creations or straining to hear if they’re making comments on what I’ve built. I tell everyone that Kate built the candy dish; I want her to get compliments on her creation. With our guests sipping wine from plastic cups, this is like a bad gallery opening.

Most people don’t say anything, but those who do want to share about what they used to build as children. When surrounded by the potent combination of things they loved as a child and alcohol, more of my friends can relate than I would have expected. I learn that they were once space and town builders, and that a few of our friends have built Star Wars sets as adults.

“My husband would love to have a playdate with you,” jokes an acquaintance.

“Anytime he wants to come over and play with LEGO, he’s welcome,” I reply, dead serious. She laughs, I don’t.

The LEGO bricks fade into the background of the party. People are more confused by my decision to hang doughnuts on strings from the door frame, a holiday tradition at grade school Halloween parties, in lieu of bobbing for apples, that apparently never migrated from Connecticut to the Midwest.

I had put the LEGO mosaic of Kate and me away for the party, since I thought it would be little strange to have our dining room table covered with green baseplates. Now, it’s three days later and I’m sorting through the pieces because I mixed up my bricks and plates in a last-minute rush to get ready. I’ve also been watching
Eight Below,
the second-best sled-dog movie of all time, for the better part of an hour. I’m moving 1 × 1 plates and 1 × 2 plates into tiny piles sorted by color, praying that all those poor dogs make it through the cold, barren winter.

I used to watch terrible action movies only when Kate was out of town. An evening between me, Paul Walker (
The Fast and the Furious, Varsity Blues, The Skulls
), and a few plates of Chinese food left me covered in a mild “shame glaze,” as the stand-up comedian Louis C.K. would say. But now it’s the middle of the day, and nobody’s out of town. I didn’t think men were hormonal. I also didn’t think I’d get choked up when Paul Walker found those courageous little huskies left to fend for themselves in the Arctic winter.

My newfound self-awareness leads to a mini shopping spree later that afternoon and a bit more self-discovery. LEGO has just released the first in its new line of Pirate sets, bringing back the popular theme. LEGO Pirates were introduced in 1989, one of the sets I never owned but coveted when I went over to a more fortunate friend’s house. The original pirates were bare-chested, mustachioed, bandana-wearing cartoons fighting a proper British armada. The new pirates have wooden legs, hook hands, and eye patches. The minifigs are more detailed, but the pirates still have a nineteenth-century adversary in the British armada.

I’m looking for the Shipwreck Hideout, a set that features the ribs of a wrecked pirate ship, cannons, and a lady pirate. But as long as I’m inside Toys “R” Us, I figure I may as well see all the sets they have in stock.

I’ve been sharing the LEGO aisle with a sixty-year-old woman, who has been turning a LEGO Ferrari set over and over for close to ten minutes.

“Can I help you?” I ask her.

“Do you work here?” she replies.

“No, ma’am, but I’ve been shopping for LEGO for a while,” I tell her.

“My grandson loves cars. He’s eight, I don’t know if he would like this.”

“That Racers set is a bit difficult, I think he might like this one a little more,” I hand her a LEGO Creator set, the green Street Speedster. “It will probably hold up better if he’s going to roll it around, too.”

“This is perfect. Thank you,” says the woman, leaving me alone in the LEGO section once again. I have just convinced someone else to buy a set, and I’m confident it’s the right one. I decide to stop equivocating and grab the Shipwreck Hideout.

“Would you like a gift receipt?” asks the clerk.

“Nope, this one’s for me,” I tell him. I don’t say that this is a milestone, the first time I’ve acknowledged that I’m purchasing a set as a gift to myself.

“Cool set,” replies the clerk, whom I would peg at about seventeen years old.

Is buying LEGO winning me points with the younger generation? Am I cool? I get a text as I’m walking away from the checkout, and I put down my bag on a bench near the door to check the message.

“Wiffleball is cool,” I overhear the clerk say to the customer who was behind me. He’s probably high, and I’m not as cool as I thought.

I haven’t built a set by myself in a while; it’s tended to be joint building with Kate. But when I get home and open the Shipwreck Hideout box, I experience the old thrill of starting with a new set. I’ve developed a bad habit of stealing pieces from sets before I’ve even built any of the creations. I still read through the instructions, looking at building techniques and the elements mix, but I’m now looking at sets as raw materials rather than as finished products.

The closest feeling I’ve experienced to this was actually during my single semester in law school. Kate and I both like to joke that I’m one-sixth of a lawyer. Law school is about training you to think with a different method of logic, examining all possibilities in order to determine interesting ways to apply the law in an advantageous manner to your client. I think my LEGO thought patterns are starting to be altered in a similar fashion. The challenge and fun aspect of building with bricks is to figure out how to turn them into an unexpected shape or sculpture—something that other people might have thought impossible. It’s about turning a yellow and black beach house into a zombie school bus. At this point, I’m a semester and a half into my LEGO education; but I won’t be driving two hundred miles to my parents’ house to tell them I’m quitting LEGO, as I might have done when I made the decision not to pursue a career in the field of law.

When Kate comes home and wants to join me, I find myself being a bit overprotective of the Pirates set. I then do something I’m not proud to admit to. I hand her an unopened Star Wars battle tank set, the latest mailing from my BrickMaster membership. It looks like a mechanized, gray hoagie on wheels.

“Could you please finish this for me? I’ve been meaning to build it, I just haven’t gotten around to it,” I ask Kate.

“No problem,” she says, unaware that I’m just trying to buy more time with the Pirates set. I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but I don’t want to share. I’m kind of sick of being Kate’s brick monkey, grabbing pieces for her while she builds.

But Kate is too adept at building, and the BrickMaster sets are really intended for children. She’s knocked out the sixty-four-piece set before the first commercial break of
My Name Is Earl.

The Pirates set has numbered bags, something that most adult fans feel is part of the continued juniorization of sets. The numbers on the bags correspond to sections in the instructions. It drastically reduces the build time from the previous packaging, which featured bags sorted by element type without numbers. On the first page of every instruction booklet are two illustrations. The first tells you not to put your LEGO on grass or a carpeted floor, but instead to use a table. It’s charming if only because it makes you envision Smurfs or gnomes really angry that LEGO might be used as a housing material in nature. The second picture, which instructs you not to mix bags but instead to dump them out separately, is the one that sets most AFOLs off on a rant.

“LEGO is now trying to tell me how to sort. I mean, are you kidding me? All I do is build and sort,” says Dave Sterling when I tell him I’m not sure how I feel about having numbered bags to guide my building.

In this case, however, numbered bags save me from an argument. I tell Kate that I want to finish the second bag, so I don’t lose track of where I am in the building process, but after that, the set is hers to finish. I know that she doesn’t need my help to build, and I no longer feel I have to constrain my desire to build in order to encourage her. I wonder if this is like when a dad decides to go all-out for the first time in a game of one-on-one with his son. He’ll likely lose shortly thereafter; and I secretly think Kate would beat me in a speed-build competition.

But I don’t wish to discover if that’s true. I’m pretty sure it would be a damaging blow to my ego, based on my unsuccessful track record with brick building competitions. Also, I’ve avoided competitions with my wife for the better part of three years. We tend not to argue outside the arena of directions or household repairs. Yet we both are competitive people, the kind who were difficult to play board games with as children. Kate will no longer play Monopoly with me after our last game, when she believed that I refused to deal with her while tacitly colluding with her brothers to force her out of the game. I maintain that I am just better at Monopoly.

In reality, Kate and I are fundamentally different builders. She isn’t really comfortable building outside the confined world of sets. She likes having a construct, lording over a world of miniature pieces. Kate not only has the patience to read the directions, but actually enjoys the sense of accomplishment that comes from checking a list. In contrast, I have embraced free building. I love not knowing what I may build when I sit down. She will likely always be a set builder, while I may build only those sets that I can’t resist. Without reading too much into it, this fits the pattern of our relationship. Kate’s organizational nature is what tempers my impulsive side. She builds the furniture. I experiment with strawberry soup. The furniture is always a safer bet than the soup, but we both appreciate what went on behind the scenes.

Since my new approach to LEGO building is a celebration, rather than a competition, I don’t want to compare skills with my wife. Also, I like that we’ve managed to find a place for LEGO in both our lives. It seems to fly in the face of the semi-serious admonition from Joe Meno to make sure that we don’t get a divorce over my new habit. But in our relationship, LEGO seems to help ease the tension and provide a break when we don’t want to tackle weightier things, such as infertility.

“LEGO lets you talk about an issue when you’re unsure of where to start. I keep seeing people that don’t know how to communicate find a way to tell their story through LEGO,” says Serious Play consultant Gary Mankellow.

The AFOL community attracts a multitude of engineers and people with advanced science backgrounds. Typically, those with a math or science bent can have trouble communicating their ideas to a layperson or someone without a similar mind-set. But LEGO seems to help cut down on the awkward silences. Adult fans have an easier time connecting because LEGO bricks offer them a common language and vehicle for self-expression. When you’ve invested a piece of yourself in a MOC, you have a greater incentive to make sure that another fan knows as much as possible about it.
This isn’t just a vignette of a dinosaur, it tells a story about who I am.