Lego Land

It’s hard to tell, but the clock tower pictured above is constructed almost completely with Lego pieces. It stands at the head of a place called Lego Land, one of the many attractions in the gigantic Mall of America located in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In addition to this clock, Lego Land displays everything from dinosaurs to race-car tracks to replicas of famous structures like the Taj Mahal, all meticulously constructed with the same play pieces that I once used as a kid. But I was no kid when I took this picture. I was a nineteen-year-old college student on spring break—surrounded by little kids. And there I was, just as excited and amazed as any of them, to have stumbled upon an amusing and fascinating fruition of my younger dreams.

As a child I didn’t have many toys. Legos were my favorite by default. I’d spend hours sprawled on the ground scavenging through my set—I think they were a mix of Star Wars and some other standard pieces— to find just the right parts for my creations. My favorite thing to build was planes, usually a futuristic-looking one meant for space travel. I’d create two or three of them and then pit them against each other in epic battles. No plane ever got shot down though. It was too heartbreaking to immediately smash them apart. It felt great to build this myself, to in a sense, “make my own toys” because it wasn’t practical at the time to just go out and buy a model plane. And while I was proud of my final creations, it was in the previous stages, when I figuring how to build the planes and putting pieces together, that I had the most fun. The joy lied in the process of creation.

This is why, when I spent more time at Lego Land, I also began to feel a little overwhelmed. The process of building was lost here. While it was an amazingly constructed place, it was also just a bit too big for me. I couldn’t fathom how to build something like that clock tower. It would require an architect’s brain, careful planning, even blueprints maybe—things all too complicated for the simple mind of a child. And the only reason I knew this, that building these huge structures would take too much time and too much effort, was because I was not a child anymore. My grown-up voice of reason laughed in my face and told me it was just decoration, just art. To just enjoy it and not imagine yourself making it. To leave that to the experts.

This is also why I thought, as I stood in awe in front of that clock tower, that if anything, I just wanted to be like the other kids running around with Lego pieces in their hands. I wanted to be my eight-year old self with my eyes bulging as I cracked open my tub. I wanted to relish the crunch of the pieces as my hands dived into the sea of black, blue, white, and red. I wanted to believe again that all things were possible with a simple click of a plastic brick.