According To Legend, I Used To Be Awesome. You Should've Seen It.

My sons’ Lego collection has become pretty extensive, which I’ve mentioned before (start reading this blog more, will you?). The Lego Star Wars sets they receive for birthdays and special occasions have amassed to an impressive fleet.

But they have a ton of loose Lego pieces as well that they free build from all the time. They know these pieces are from my old sets when I was a kid, but they don’t completely understand their true significance.

These pieces are the remnants of a lost city.

Once, long ago, in the depths of my parents’ basement, a great metropolis thrived. It contained all the necessary components of any good town: a police station, a fire station, an airport, a railroad, a parking garage, and a space shuttle that was so close to the rest of the town that had it ever actually launched, the city would have perished in flame (thankfully, the municipality’s space program apparently ran out of funding). There was even a news tower and a mansion complete with connecting secret lair that housed a Batman rip-off vigilante super hero, whose vehicles and special weaponry I took special pride in constructing.

In the winter, cotton would line the streets and sidewalks as artificial snow. When spring returned, the cotton would…melt? The residents of the city would not stand idle for days on end. Every day, they moved about, posed differently than they had been the day before. New buildings grew on the outskirts of the city, causing it to expand constantly.

Then, one day, the city crumbled. Like Atlantis, the great gathering of Lego buildings, vehicles and minifigures simply disappeared. Broken down and disassembled, the bricks from the old Lego republic live on in my sons’ creations, with only the occasional whispered mention that those bricks used to be a part of something bigger. Something important.

And like Atlantis, physical evidence of the city’s existence is impossible to come by. I would have sworn that my father had taken at least a few pictures of the large collection of Lego sets that spanned over two large, otherwise unused dining room tables that had been moved into the basement.

Alas, they do not seem to exist. I suppose that my parents assumed I would achieve something far more impressive at some point during my lifetime than that Lego city and pictures of it were not a priority. I don’t think they expected the Lego city to be my crowning achievement. Other than my wife (who I take credit only for finding, not making) and sons (who I take half, sometime 60% credit for making), I have yet to provide much worthy of photographic documentation. I suppose I’d better pick up that slack.

In a discussion with my father the other day, he mentioned that he discovered the blurred corner of my once great Lego city in the background of an old photograph, over the shoulder of its true subject. While he offered to send it to me so that I could show it to my boys, it felt rather like something that believers in the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot might latch on to in a desperate attempt to convince the rest of the world they were not crazy all these years.

I know what I saw!

I told my dad he need not worry about getting me the picture. I remember what it looked like. Plus, I can talk a good game. Probably a much better game than I can build.

Instead of trying to show my boys what I’d built, I’ve decided that their father’s tales of the glory of his old Lego city are probably far more impressive than it ever actually looked anyway. It helps me inspire them to build bigger and better each day so that when they surpass my achievements, I can enjoy living vicariously through them.