Building Blocks

January 1988 - September 1990

The memories that I can recall from my childhood are few, but of what I do remember tends to be focused on the simple joy of being a child: having fun. While humans are fundamentally the same physically, it is our emotional and mental makeup that defines us, and my early childhood was dominated by creativity via imagination.

Essentially, my toys defined me.

As early as I can remember I was surrounded by toys for boys. Toy cars, big yellow toy dump trucks, over-sized plastic train sets and little play power tools were some of the things I set my hands on when I was younger. By the time my family and I settled into our new house by Haskins, however, my interest in pre-fabricated toys gave way to the limitless possibilities of my imagination: Legos came into my life at just the right time.

Legos - the colored plastic building blocks that have been around for decades - captured my imagination once I learned what they were really capable of doing for me. Rather than try to get a toy hammer or an oddly-shaped toy car to fit into whatever imaginative world I conjured up on any given day, Legos let me build what I needed. This was incredible freedom for me. While my imagination was my first and ultimate gateway into my own world, I no longer had to imagine that my toy cars had wings and could fly - I instead built a toy car with wings that in my eyes, could fly.

Essentially, this was my first foray into bringing the imaginary into reality. I built planes, houses, roads, islands, spaceships, battlegrounds, and whatever else my mind felt like dreaming up. Sometimes I built abstract shapes just to see what the interconnections of the Legos could do. How could one make a sphere with square bricks? I sure tried to make a sphere with square bricks.

Legos made the intangible tangible for me, and my fascination with the color plastic building blocks that began when I was about four years old lasted for years to come, never really truly dying until I simply lost them to a garage sale. Even at twenty-five, however, I have plenty more that I can dream up that Legos will one day help me build.

1984

October 1984

Twenty-five is such a young age, no matter how old it may feel at the time, but all things considered, it is a young age. As a child it is easy to say "when I grow up" a lot, and as a teenager it is easy to say "in a few years." But by the age of twenty-five, "when I grow up" and "in a few years" happens to be known as "now." There is no more delay, no procrastination. Twenty-five is as adult as it get, even if there is a lot of growing up to do yet.

The biggest transition from adolescent to adult, the distinguishing human characteristic of maturity, is the creation of a new adolescent: parenthood.

That is where my story begins. I am the same age now as my parents were when they became, well, parents. I can not see myself being a parent right now, and I think they felt the same way at twenty-five, because I was born three years before they would be married. For all the growing up that I have done, I do not feel like I am ready for parenthood by any stretch of the imagination, yet I was raised from this tender age.

I do not remember the first years of my life with any worthwhile detail, but I do know that I was born on a cool October 4th afternoon in 1984, and my first home was an apartment complex just between Toledo and Maumee right off US 475/23. I have never really talked with my parents about the grinding details of my first years, but I know that my parents were not terribly interested in raising their unexpected family in a tiny apartment. It did not take long for my parents to move us into a new apartment on Airport Highway, where we lived for three years before seeing another addition to the family: my sister.

I applaud my parents for whatever they did to bring me into the world properly in these first years. My mom began her career as a nurse at the now-defunct Riverside Hospital, fresh out of school, and my dad was moving between jobs, from a manager at a local restaurant to a desk job with a local Toledo company. I can imagine that nothing was was easy, having to raise a newborn, manage new jobs, and move between apartments.

At age three, with a sister on the way, it was time to make the Bruno family official, and my parents married one another, an event of which I have absolutely no memories. Shortly after my sister was born, we moved far from Toledo into a quirky yellow house near Haskins, Ohio, and the foundation for the rest of my life was set.

1984 was a good year indeed, but my life as I most remember it wouldn't kick off until at least 1989.

Introduction

At the time of this writing, I am twenty-five years old. I did not learn to appreciate writing until the age of fifteen. In the last ten years I have undertaken many writing challenges - short stories, novellas, countless essays, two blogs, and countless of other little scribbles. Despite the dozens of story ideas that I have either written or wish to write, one has generally alluded me: my story. I spend so much of my time working to craft readable fiction from my ideas that I have never considered taking the time to write an autobiographical story about me, the people in my life, and what has come of my first twenty-five years of life.

Perhaps I have been worried that I might bore my readers with such a self-reflective story, or perhaps I was afraid that twenty-five years is not enough of a story to tell. I no longer believe that either of these are true. I have plenty to say, and plenty of interesting ways to say it.

Using a combination of the blog format and Facebook, I intend to spend the next couple of years retelling little chunks of my life story. Rather than dump out one huge autobiographical work at once, I will write small chunks at a time, picking the most entertaining, historically relevant, or useful memories from my past and turning them into pseudo-fiction. I will retell my memories as best as I can recall them while embellishing for the sake of entertaining semi-fiction just enough to make all the writing truly worthwhile.

My intention is to begin young and work my way up to where I am now. Of course, I cannot recall memories from my early childhood, so I will become much more creative in my telling of these early years, even if the stories do not always center on me. As for Facebook integration, as the stories approach the modern day I plan to link back to relevant Facebook posts, statuses, or photos. And of course, there will be the occasional out-of-order story in the event that I feel it worthwhile to skip-around my timeline.

The B3 Backstory will begin soon, with the first chapter simply entitled "1984."