What I found digging through 41 years of LEGO bricks

A few months ago I embarked on the Sisyphean task of organizing the LEGO collection in our house. I mean, let’s be truthful:  it’s my collection, but my children have historically been the happy recipients of sets that I have ultimately folded into the larger pile of bricks over time. And what a long time it has been collecting, disassembling, and pretty consistently enjoying this big mess of ABS plastic. 

My first memory of a LEGO set is the Galaxy Explorer from 1979 (which I rebuilt a few years ago). Since then I’ve never consciously thrown any bricks out, though certainly some have been lost and many have been broken. Using weight as a rough approximation for quantity we have well over 55,000 loose LEGO pieces. (Closer to 100,000 if you count pieces actually residing in built sets and MOCs.)

The actual sorting through all that has been fascinating and therapeutic, equal parts mind-numbingly meditative and joyful. But perhaps the most interesting part of this whole process has been sifting out all the junk in the bins that is not LEGO. And there was a lot of it, specifically 8.325 lbs of accumulated detritus of my youth (with some pieces from my kids’ younger days too). Sieving through it was a kind of autobiographical archaeology, a forensics of youthful amusement.

Inspired by Amsterdam’s dredging of a few canals to install a new subway line where they uncovered and displayed centuries of things from everyday life, I thought I’d lay out a small selection of the non-LEGO trove here. It’s an incomplete picture of how I grew up, but a picture just the same.

• metal Gatorade cap from when it was sold in glass bottles
• Native American arrowhead from a felt display box I had from a trip out west — easily my favorite find
• Ace of Spades, mutilated
• Playmobil figures, many balding as I am
• Little Green Men and various figurines of people shooting things 
• Play-Doh container cap
• hair barrette and tie (my sister’s)
• toy rings
• dice
• magnetic refrigerator letters
• spent toy gun caps
• all manner of broken LEGO
• counterfeit LEGO
• game pieces — I think The Dark Tower is in here, loved that game (which is coming back!)
• puzzle pieces
• hockey playing card — of note, I never followed hockey in my youth
• air hockey puck — also of note, we did not own an air hockey table
• lip gloss — possibly mine, probably my sister’s
• marbles and bouncy balls
• pennies with a lot of verdigris
• tickets (likely from Showbiz Pizza)
• a Paris Metro ticket (huh?)
• cassette tape labels — used, naturally!
• dominoes 
• note fragment in what I think is my sister’s handwriting: “Adolescn .. any perio … tends to b … by a group”
• embossed label strip — loved those things
• post-it note w/ scrawl — looks like testing a marker
• a Toys ‘R’ Us tag for $29.99 — wonder what that was?
• various stickers
• a thimble 
• lotta crayons and writing implements
• Matchbox car and USAF Blackbird
• toy monorail — transit, baby!
• Nerf dart
• a magnet that has pulled together random metal bits
• an Enter key
• a half-gnawed pretzel stick, easily 30+ years old
• part of a in-ear headphone
• other unidentifiable cruft

Not exactly panning for gold, but there’s definitely a Toy Story-esque nostalgia at play. Literally play, which is the only consistent throughline with all this junk. My youth was certainly filled with electronic gadgets, video games, and computers — but none (or very few) of those have lasted. What remains in this re-assambled time capsule are the simpler items, perhaps the best items. A collection of fragments shored against, if not ruin, then the ruinous loss of innocence. I’m not throwing any of this away.