L – Lego Man
From early childhood to his pre-adolescent days, my son’s collection of Lego pieces increased geometrically. He had everything from basic sets, to Star Wars collections, to Pirate adventures and more. It got to a point that we ended up buying large shelving units with multiple bins from Ikea, just so we could store some of his completed projects as well as the plethora of loose pieces from disassembled creations.
We even went on a vacation to Legoland in California when he was 10 years old.
His desire to have more legos and to create real things with them increased a thousandfold after that trip.
I don’t remember when it happened. I’m still not sure if it was a dream or reality. As I woke up that day, I felt very stiff. My skin felt rather brittle and moving was difficult, more robotic than natural. As I reached the bathroom and looked in the mirror over
the sink, I knew what was wrong. I had turned into a Lego man.
I called downstairs but no one answered. As I walked to the stairway I noticed that everything around me, the walls, the stairs, the windows, and doors were all built out of legos. As I stepped outside I saw an entire landscape of lego construction. What does one do when one discovers that their world has turned to lego? It was very hard to walk, for every step I took connected me to the floor, step, or ground that I was attempting to walk on. On the plus side, as hard as it was to move, being planted on the surface made it less likely that I was going to fall down and get hurt.
And then I saw him. It was my son. He was real and not lego. I could tell by the smile on his face that he had accomplished something that no one had done before. Not only had he built an entire lego environment, but it appeared that he had created his own lego family as well. I assumed my lego wife was somewhere else or he hadn’t constructed her yet.
I didn’t know whether to feel proud and congratulate him on his achievement or get angry at him for what he had done to me. He slowly came up to me and put his hand on my arm. I felt a twisting motion and a popping sound, like my arm was being pulled out of its socket and that was all.
The next thing I knew I was back in bed again, only this time it was a lot easier to move around. A quick look at myself in the bathroom mirror showed that everything was back to normal.
I rushed downstairs and into my son’s room just as he was putting some legos back in a bin on his shelf.
“I just had the craziest dream,” I said to him.
“I don’t think so,” was his reply and he just smiled at me, with that same smile that he had had on his face when I had seen him as Lego man.
We never spoke of it again. But every once in a while when I would walk in on him while he was building something with Legos, he would just tilt his head at me, nod, and give a knowing little smirk.
My son grew up, graduated college, got married, and is now living far away from us in a house with his wife in Virginia. For the most part, his Legos remain, stored in those same bins in our basement. Some pieces have been given away to others, but the rest of his collection of random pieces lives on as does some of the major creations he made. All except for that one big construction that I’m sure he made way back when that I guess I’ll never really find out if it was real or just a dream.
