I was at the story with the lady the other day, and it struck me how much I urgently wanted to peruse the toy section of the store. If nothing else, I wanted to get a sense of how much toys have changed since I had grown and had the world beat out my sense of wonderment and imagination.

I’ve always loved Legos.  Hands down, I spent more of my haphazard, hard-to-come-by spending cash on little colored, plastic blocks than any other luxury and did so gladly.  But the Legos of my day suffered from a sort of generic flavor that kids today will not have to contend with.  Each of my brothers had claimed a faction.  I believe my older brother took one of the knightly groups; my younger brother took the other.  This left me with the Wolfpack, a bunch of scrappy, forest dwelling bandits, which was great except that they only really had three sets to collect.  In the end, this didn’t really phase me though.  Newer creatures and sets would eventually fall into my hands, and as my brother outgrew his, I become the proud recipient of his building block legacy.

Fast forward two decades and the world has changed.  Legos pour forth in abundance, and kids today (did I type that?!) have such an awesome variety of characters, themes, and sets that I seriously contemplated buying them for myself.  One product line in particular, Alien Conquest, caught my eye.  An alien invasion?  A kind of Lego face-hugger?  Alien spacecraft and terrestrial defense forces?  X-Com meets Legos, yes, please!  There’s so much out there!  From Harry Potter to ninjas, there’s a cornucopia of Lego products ready and willing to satisfy the intellectual cravings of a young mind.  I can only wonder at how my younger self would have been overwhelmed by such prospects.

If there’s one thing I hate about being an adult (maybe not the thing I hate the most), it’s the unspoken pressure to put away childish things and to let go of that little spark of delight when you get a hold of something like a new Lego set.  There’s something infinitely therapeutic about toys, and that childish part of myself envies the youngsters who get to tear open a new package and struggle at building something new and wondrous from what was previously only a jumble of unrelated, plastic bits.