January 1988 - September 1990
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.
