Lego

Ever played with Lego? 
Maybe you got a simple Duplo set for your fourth birthday. You’d get a plastic-wrapped set of these big clunky plastic blocks, oddly light but with a real heft to them, topped with odd pairs of dimples. Strange, they seemed, odd and regimented, and even though they were made of plastic they didn’t deform or break no matter how hard you bit ‘em. Too big and clunky for biting, too, seriously, who designed these things? No thought for milk-teethed tots!

But then. Pick a block up, feel the top’s knobbly texture against your palm. And push it onto another block. It sticks! It stays there! And you can do it again! Hey, look, you’ve got a great big bag of the beasties too! Stick them together in various simplistic ways (hey, it’s a start, but ugh Duplo), and bam, you’ve got yourself a car. Or a duck. Or a train.

Forward a few years. Maybe you’re seven. The Duplo set has been gathering dust for a good while now. Why? Toyworld. There’s this amazing gleaming store in the local mall. It sells nothing but toys. Not like one of those great big general-purpose stores which might just kinda sorta have this miserable little toy section skulking in back. Hah. This store has nothing but Good Bits. Nothing but gleaming treasure, glittering prizes, incredible goodies (apart from the oh so pink Barbie / doll section ugh girls cooties blergh) but but but the Lego! Gigantic cardboard-shelled infinities of astonish! You pick up a box, staggering under its weight a bit for that shit is heavy to a seven-year-old, shake it, and the thousands of bits of Lego all rattle at once. Not mere Duplo dozens but Lego thousands. The granularity! The precision! The exquisite plastic elegance!

Then you sneak a look at the price and you shrivel up and die. $109.99? There is not that much money in the world. You lie. Not even your dad makes that much. It is not possible. Still, the set’s a galaxy of perfection. Gotta try, right? The Lego Space Marines OMG2000 Lunar Drilling Ore Precision Extraction E.T Popsicles set? Who’d say no to that? Miss Trunchbull, that’s who. Or the Head Witch from The Witches.

You approach your mum. She’d never be like them, right? She’s on your side! She’ll buy it. Honest. She looms over you. You’re seven, she’s a mile high or something.

“Muuuuuumm....”

That sinusoidal whine kids do when they want something. She looms over you still more loomily and looks at you. Her expression says We’re in a toy store crammed with impossible levels of Holy Shit Gimme, designed for the specific purpose of making the hearts of prepubescent children explode with impotent yearning. What could possibly be on your mind, O my beloved vaginal emission? 
You pause. The whine doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect. You try again.

“MuuUUUummMMM...”

“sigh Yes, dear? What is it?”

“Can I”“No”

“...But I””No”

You smart with the injustice. What! She doesn’t even know what you want! Your lip trembles. “But Mum!”

“All right, sweetie, god give me strength what toy have you been looking at?”

Aha! We’re in! “Mum it’s Lego! It's the Kung Fu Dinosaur Holy Crap Ninja Fusion Battle Excelsior Laser Sexy set!” You rattle off the buzzwords like you’re casting an Ease The Pain Of Carrying Around All That Useless Money spell.

She takes one look at the price tag and her eyes narrow. “I don’t know, dear, it’s awfully expensive.”

“MummmmmmM....” She’s GOT to say yes! It goes against all that is right and noble and honest and decent not to let you have it!

She smiles faintly. “....Your birthday’s coming up, isn’t it?”

“My ... mymy birthday?” What? Don’t you dare dodge this mother. Lego. NOW.

“Tell you what, sweetie, if you’re on your best behaviour over the next month, I’ll buy you it for your birthday.”

You freeze, stricken with the agony of So Near Yet So Far. A month! That’s decades! Aeons! Entire geologic periods will come and go before then! The ice caps will advance and retreat across the globe before your birthday arrives. Civilisations will rise and fall and rise once more. Steaming mangrove swamps with huge dragonflies will envelop the world and vanish, time and time again. The very continents of the world will squiggle and reshape themselves and burn out with age. The geriatric Earth will greet your eighth birthday with withered red deserts, your new Lego set will be small comfort indeed as together you wander Earth’s crumbling desolation, frightened and starving and utterly alone. You start crying. Mum starts growling.

Of course your birthday arrives before you know it. You spring bolt upright in bed at minus infinity-o-clock, heart bursting with anticipation. It’s here! It’s finally here! Birthday and Lego! The Chainsaw McDaddy Tactical Awesome DNA Large Fries Bazonga Nuclear set will finally be yours! You leap off the bed, pull the blanket off, tie two corners around your neck as a makeshift cape, go woohoo, burst out of your room, gallumph down the stairs three at a time and into the lounge, look out the window, that’s odd it’s dark, hang on no-one’s up, hah we shall fix that, gallumph back up the stairs and towards your parents’ room to prod their lazy arses into gear for now they will deliver on their Lego promise, and get within a metre of the door before it’s flung open with great violence and Mum emerges.

“YOU.” Her eyes are fatigued fire.

You falter. “Uu... lego?”

“It’s 3am. Go. To. Bed.”

“But it’s my birthday! Lego-”

“If you aren’t back in bed and asleep in ten seconds Young Man, then for MY birthday you will get me a retroactive abortion voucher. MOVE.”

“Butbutbut-”

“Actually, hah, no, you were born at 4:45! I was there, you know, I remember it well. It is NOT your birthday, not for a couple of hours. Now then. Back to bed. If you’re quiet as a mouse until 7:30, THEN, and only then, you will get your present. BED!”

You trudge off and back to your room, blanket-cape dragging forlornly behind you. Hmph and double hmph and a triple hmph thrown in for good measure. Hours. Argh. Ages. You pout and you sulk and you have a little cry and then feel a bit better and still feel abuzz with great excitement and anticipation. You bounce up and down in bed. 
Quiet as a mouse, she said. Mice can play the drums, can’t they? I bet they can.