Not for Kids

Happy 50th Birthday, Legos!

My parents, not being masochists, never bought me Legos. They do hurt pretty badly to step on with bare feet. Not as badly as old-fashioned wooden building blocks do, but they wreak worse havoc with the vacuum cleaner.

It's a shame, because I've always loved Legos. Or at least I always thought they were cool, but I really fell in love with them when my cousin Gretchen (who picked up after herself) introduced me to the single-wide ones. My interest in them was always primarily architectural - I never really cared about the specialized kits for building bulldozers or spaceships. With the long single-wide ones and a few big flat base pieces, you can make a kick-ass house. And if you've designed it right, you'll also build interior walls and make furniture to scale inside: kitchen and bathroom fittings, sofas and tables, chairs and beds, pianos, stereo equipment, TVs, you name it. The Lego company also makes nice windows, but the doors are a disgrace. A Lego person walking upright couldn't fit through one. What the hell's up with that? Anyway, you want to use clear bricks in the bathroom walls instead of windows, for privacy, you know.

Remember how awful it was when you realized you were just one brick short of being able to get the color scheme you had in mind? Of course you do.

I had Tinkertoys, but never liked them as much. On the other hand, I once went over to someone's house to play who had a set of giant Tinkertoys in the rec room, large enough to build structures we could crawl and walk through. That was awesome! I couldn't tell you how old my friend was or whether it was a boy or a girl. But I'll never forget the giant Tinkertoys.

Once my ex-husband and I came across a big moving box full of a hundred million Legos at a garage sale. It was great. We played with those things for years. Eventually my kids got old enough to be interested and play with them and leave them scattered everywhere, so I finally packed them up and gave them away. I'm not a masochist.