Thoughts on Legoland
How come the memory of some plastic toy bricks elicited feelings stronger than those of going to the actual place where I was born and raised?
Note: This is an essay on my short story Legoland — read it first!
It all started pretty much as it does in the story: facetiming with my parents, who were taking care of my two nephews; they asked the eldest to tell me about his upcoming birthday party. I asked if I could come (which I also immediately regretted, not because I was depressed but because I live almost five thousand miles away and didn’t wanna create false expectations) but he said no because there weren’t enough chairs. My parents then asked him to tell me the theme of the party, and he replied “garbage truck.” After laughing, I remembered: my first Lego set was a garbage truck.
The flashback is also pretty accurate, but it didn’t happen on Christmas Day, it happened on Three King’s Day, celebrated on January 6th — also known as Epiphany, when the Magi visited baby Jesus. In some places, like Argentina, it’s also a day when children get presents: we left our slippers out on the 5th before bed, and would wake up to find gifts in them, usually bigger and better than those we got for Christmas (which was lighter fare — one time I got a belt). In 1997 (or 98?), I woke up to find a lollipop, and was pretty disappointed, until my dad told me to check again, and there it was: a small box wrapped in brown paper.
After the conversation with my nephew, I googled and found that original garbage truck, including the image on the box of the minifigure running after his truck:
I felt like crying when I saw it. I hadn’t thought about Legos in such a long time, let alone that one that I remembered so fondly, almost with a magical reverence — I did in fact retell that Three Kings story many times as a kid, to the point that it felt almost unreal, fictional. Finding it on Google, proof that it wasn’t part of a personal mythology but rather an actual Lego set that many people had owned, was shocking, like in the movies when people find marks on their skin that prove their dreams were real. I was moved in a primal way, one that felt especially poignant in the dry emotional landscape that was 2020.
I started Googling other sets and confirming, every time with that sentimental pang, that they existed in the real world (every model mentioned by name and number in Legoland corresponds to one I actually owned). It was an emotional exercise, because each model brought back memories not only of the pieces that made it up, their shape and color, but also of pieces of my childhood, special occasions (first communion, my dad returning from a trip) or mundane snapshots (playing by the pool and losing pieces in the grass) that made me revisit a time in my life I seldom think about.
Truth is, I don’t like thinking about my childhood, and part of it is because I know that it was objectively good, in the sense that I had a family who loved me, and never lacked a roof over my head, food on my plate, or a school to educate me. But I’m not able to remember it that way; it almost doesn’t matter how it was objectively because I can’t be objective about it. I feel a detachment to the facts of it. In December of 2019, I visited my hometown for the first time in almost ten years, and it was a strange exercise: I walked by places that my memory recognized, but somehow they didn’t seem like mine, as if I had heard of them, or seen them in a movie, but not actually lived in them. The trauma that ended my childhood seems to have split my Self like the Horcruxes in Harry Potter: a different Francisco had lived in that town, a Francisco that I knew but no longer was.
With the Legos, however, it was different. Their connection to my brain seemed to run deeper than my hometown’s: here was objective proof that I had been happy. Each model reminded me of an occasion that had been made special by the gift, and the feeling felt real in a way that my hometown hadn’t. It felt like a reclaiming of something I had lost, and I started clinging to it almost obsessively. Like Robert in the story, I felt dread at the thought that I wouldn’t find all of the sets I used to own, perhaps subconsciously afraid that one of them contained another happy memory and I would miss it. I also eventually remembered the catalogs, and again I almost cried once I found the ones I was looking for: I felt as excited as I did when I was a kid, getting lost in those scenarios, imagining those adventures. I remembered looking through them for hours, having as much fun as I did actually playing with the toys, because although the catalogs were meant to make you want to buy other sets, they also stimulated daydreaming, living up to the “Just Imagine…” slogan printed in all of them.
In finding the catalogs, I also found the answer to the flurry of feelings that the simple conversation with my nephew had awoken: how come the memory of some plastic toy bricks had elicited feelings stronger than those of going to the actual place where I was born and raised? I think there are two reasons: one, that this pandemic has taken away a lot of things I used to look forward to. It’s been a really long time since I was excited about anything, and Legos used to represent excitement for me. There were few things I looked forward to more than getting a new set, and just one would renew the entire collection, adding new pieces, new characters, new possibilities to every other brick I owned.
Which brings me to reason two: I think the reason I liked Legos so much as a kid is they allowed me to imagine the life I wanted to live. I’ve always been an adventurer at heart; if you ever read anything I’ve written, chances are you’ve come across a mention of the pirate and explorer stories I used to devour as soon as I learned how to read. I still remember playing in the backyard when I was 7 or 8 and looking up to see the branch of a tree poking out of our neighbor’s yard, and behind it the Andes mountains (which are visible from almost anywhere in my hometown). The image broke my heart, so much so that I can still remember it decades later: it was a reminder that beyond the walls of my house lay a tree, a mountain, and endless other things that I would never get to experience if I stayed in the safety that my home provided.
So here I am, as I said, almost five thousand miles away, living the adventures I dreamed of as a child — except of course, I’m stuck at home, confined inside these walls, and all of the excitement has died down. The Legos invited me to go back to a time of endless possibility, when deciding which kind of life I wanted to have was as simple as “Just Imagine…”
* * *
Once the story started taking shape, I brought it up in therapy, and the doctor raised an eyebrow — that the premise of the story is a man obsessing with retrieving childhood memories only to find they didn’t cure his depression felt like a disownment of the work we engage in every session. But I, unlike the protagonist, am very fond of both therapy and my doctor, so I felt the need to explain that the point of the story is not that it’s useless to think of the past; in fact I find it quite helpful to disrupt patterns of present behavior. I’ve developed a theory regarding the end of childhood (that is, for those of us privileged enough to have had a happy one): I think that most of us have some sort of event happening when we were 10 to 15 years old (I was 12) that ushered us into adulthood before we were ready, usually by puncturing the notion that adults are perfect and completely in control. And that usually occurs when said adults hand us said control, like driving instructors who take the hands of the wheel even though we’ve never driven a car before, and the challenge far exceeds our prepubescent abilities, so we end up totalling the car (that is, our childhood). Typing “I never played with Legos after that trip,” which in the story is a line delivered ironically, felt very very true. My love of Legos, the illusion that they provided, the endless possibilities, died after that crash. Unlike Robert, though, memory of the crash itself was never forgotten by me, even though its significance to the rest of my life took time (and therapy!) to understand.
The point of the story is that Robert has been focusing on the wrong thing the whole time: just knowing what’s making you unhappy won’t make you happy. There are usually layers and layers of lived experience on top of the crash. It’s like a cigarette butt that starts a wildfire: tracing the source might be important to understand what happened, but it cannot be divorced from putting out the fire. Thinking about the past is only useful, in my opinion, when we also put in the work to actually be happy, which is, as I’ve said before, an active daily choice.
It’s not the memories that playing with the Legos can unlock that matter most — it’s the fact that we’re playing, metaphorically speaking. To allow that magic and excitement to come back into our lives is to help make the chore of adulthood worth it because we find meaning in it, something to look forward to.
* * *
In my case, playing with Legos ended up not being only metaphorical, because shortly after writing the story, I found myself wandering off the usual aisles I stick to at Target and landing on the toy section. I confess I was a bit disappointed: it seems that, since we parted, Legos have become a bit less magical. It could be, of course, that I grew up — but it could also be that the digital age doesn’t take kindly to toys, and Lego did what it had to do to survive. This New York Times article explores the issue thoroughly, but it mainly comes down to: a) simplifying production and b) franchise tie-ins. The first is easily noticeable; modern Lego sets are economical, their imagination constricted by necessity (part of the simplification process was eliminating custom parts, which cost the company a lot to make). When I was a kid, any given theme (say, Medieval Knights) would have sets ranging from the tiny (just a king and his horse) to the enormous (the entire castle). It was usually the tiny sets — often the ones my family could afford — that awoke my imagination the most, encouraging me to use random bricks to build a whole scenario around the lone minifig and its few accessories. These are now mostly gone, themes streamlined to a couple of sets, usually median in size, with not a lot of range for imagination.
The second (commercial tie-ins) is the one that makes the most sense but makes me saddest. During my Lego phase, the company created most of its themes in house, sometimes even with original characters (like Johnny Thunder and his band of adventurers). I quit playing right around the time Hollywood reared its head, first with Star Wars (I owned a couple of those) and then with Harry Potter — but they were still an oddity. Now, themes adhere to franchises: you want pirates? There’s a Pirates of the Caribbean line. Medieval Knights? Lord of The Rings. Adventure? Indiana Jones, Jurassic World – even Stranger Things! Psychologist Dr. Jonathan Sinowitz, quoted in the Times article, puts it best: ays. “When you have a less structured, less themed set, kids have the ability to start from scratch. When you have kids playing out Indiana Jones, they’re playing out Hollywood’s imagination, not their own.”
Combined, these two tactics — simpler sets and pre-existing franchises — seem to negate the “Just Imagine…” slogan I grew up with (in fact, the current slogan is the very efficient “Play On”). Almost nothing is left to the imagination, even in the smallest details: minifigures used to have blank, smiley faces, at most with some facial alteration (mustache, scar) that matched the theme; now most have full expressions, sometimes more than one etched on each side of their heads so they can express fear and happiness. I noticed it even on the animal figures, which used to have dots for eyes and now have furrowed brows if they’re dangerous (shark, crocodile) or shiny pupils if they’re tame (dogs, horses).
However, I eventually came upon a set that had me curious to know more: 21322 Pirates of Barracuda Bay. First of all, it was about pirates, one of my favorite themes when I was a kid. Second, it was not a commercial tie-in; it belongs to a line called Ideas, which collects models created by fans and upvoted on the Ideas website for official consideration. This one was created by a Lego enthusiast who used to play with the old pirate sets as a kid (his creation is partly based on the 1989 set 6285 Black Seas Barracuda), and endeavored to bring some of their magic back. That really shows in how richly detailed the set is, with hidden compartments and small touches like paintings on the walls, the sort of thing that would give my 8-year-old self a big endorphin rush.
And perhaps most importantly: it’s BIG. Like I said before, my family couldn’t really afford bigger models when I was a kid, so even the biggest ones I owned were medium-sized by Lego standards. I used to dream of getting one of the large ones, the ones whose boxes had flaps you could flip open to get a glimpse of what was inside, because there was so much to show. The Pirates of Barracuda Bay is expensive, but I decided to splurge (though not without some guilt, and not without checking with a few friends first, all of who encouraged me to treat myself) and to be a child again and fulfill a childhood dream at the same time. So, before I could think about it too much, I put it in my cart and clicked “check out.”
I expected the kind of box I described (the one with a flap), which would usually be around 14’’ x 8’’. Reader, this was not that. I almost thought Target had made a wrong delivery when it arrived — the box was HUGE:
Kid me would have died.
It ended up taking me a very fun 10 days to put it all together. It didn’t much resemble playing with Legos as a kid; adult me was sadly less concerned with the story of how this shipwreck (which can also be pulled apart and built into a whole ship) came to happen, and more with getting the instructions right. The whole process resembled putting together IKEA furniture, and some of my friends compared it to the puzzle craze that has swept middle-class white people during the pandemic. All I know is it was fun, engaging, and yielded a crop of Instagram stories which can still be accessed on my profile, and to which more than one follower responded outing themselves as former Lego enthusiasts, telling me about their collections or wishing we could get together to play.
The finished product now sits on a coffee table next to a stack of Playbills — both, one could say, relics of olden times. It makes me a little sad that that’s who I am now, someone who keeps Legos on shelf, instead of breaking them down to build new things, or at least play with the minifigs, inventing scenarios. But the other day, admiring its details while looking away from a TV show that bored me, I realized something: the whole thing is insanely intricate in a way that I didn’t realize when building it. How could it surprise me to find details like small flowers around a rock hidden under the dock, when I built those very details? I realized I didn’t notice what I was doing when I built it; I didn’t know what each individual thing would become — I was just putting together the pieces in the order mandated by the manual, a mere pair of hands executing the design that someone thousands of miles away (and years in the past) came up with. I built this model, but I didn’t create it, and I could only truly appreciate it once it was done. As far as metaphors go, that’s a great one.
I guess there is no use resenting what happened in my past, or the way things are now. I can only see the bricks, but I can’t see the whole model yet; looking back later, it might all make perfect sense. The important thing, for me, is to remember every day to “Just Imagine…”
Illustration by Deepti Sunder, revision by Lilly Camp.
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