LEGO: Resurrection

 

If there was one toy that defined my childhood, I would quickly pick LEGOs. By far, I spent more time playing with my LEGOs than I did any other toy. In fact, if I had to hazard a guess, I would say that the hours that I spent playing with them didn't measure just in hours, days, weeks or even months but rather probably was on the magnitude of a year or more of my entire life. With no television and no modern day distractions, I often spent my waking childhood winter days in the old farmhouse situated on the living room floor by the wood stove, raking my LEGOs back and forth looking for the next piece to finish my latest creative build, much to the annoyance of my parents.

LEGO never fully went away out of my life. I credit them a part of my marriage as well. During one of my first dates with my future wife, we got to talking about them and how we both loved playing with them. When our children were born and became of the appropriate age, visits to the farm would often involve dragging out a suitcase full of my old LEGOs that my mom, in her infinite wisdom, had saved and playing with them with my girls. However, LEGO didn't register with them like it did with me, perhaps because there are so many more distractions to hold their attention. They would build a set if I gave one to them, and I still occasionally do, but after the set was done, their time with LEGO was done. They didn't immediately tear them apart and build things from the imagination as I did.

Maybe about a decade ago, I discovered LEGOs geared toward adults. They come in these massive sets with thousands of pieces each. Being of the age where I was hard to buy gifts for, I just saved my wife the effort and would buy one of these sets for myself every few years and build the set over a couple months during the winter after I opened up my "present" Christmas morning. I have built three of such sets, all exotic sports car 1/8th scale replicas that now sit above my office upper cabinets where I now type this post. Unlike my childhood, these are more art than play as they are incredibly detailed and complex and I have no desire to tear them apart to build something else. 

I only have bought one every two or three years because they are pretty expensive and there aren't that many of them to start with. In the exotic sport car category, there is only one set that I'm missing and I will likely buy it in another year or two to complete the collection. But recently something happened that has given me perhaps another goal to do until then. I watched a video on YouTube.

In that video, some young man was invited to the house of a lady whose father has recently passed away to buy some of his massive LEGO collection. The deceased man had lived in a two story house with a full attic and basement, so essentially four levels and was completely stuffed with LEGOs of every kind. The young man filled the largest U-Haul rental truck full of LEGOs he bought for $165,000 and left behind enough LEGOS to still fill an entire room floor to ceiling in my house.  That video brought on another video that was centered around Space LEGOs specifically, which were the sets I assembled as a child. Those sets are somewhere in the box full of LEGOs at the top of this post.

Since I am not due for "receiving" another adult LEGO set this Christmas (I wrote this a couple weeks ago), I thought perhaps an entertaining project might be to sort out those old Space LEGO sets out of the box above and put them together, for the first time since they were gifted to me nearly 50 years ago. I'm not sure what I'll do with them at that point, but I know they have since become somewhat collectible based off the YouTube videos I have seen. Perhaps I'll sell them and move them onto someone who might appreciate them as I did. Some pieces in some of the sets I have, are now extremely collectible because they are no longer made and are hard to find. But I can't determine an outcome until I have each set sorted out and it is know to be 100% complete.

When I had this idea, I knew that I could write a number of posts on this subject and so I might consider this venture a limited series run on this blog with this being the first post. I'll let time determine how far I'll actually take it.