Assemblage

One of the prizes I won the other night at a trivia night was a little Lego set. I hadn't touched Legos in years and years, so it seemed neat to get to play with them again for, as they say, old time's sake. I couldn't help myself, and opened up the package. It was a Star Trek-themed set, and I reflected on the sort of stuff I'd had when I was a kid. I don't remember having too many custom sets. I seemed to have very general legos with which I made things using my imagination. I even made Star Trek ships, but I had to improvise.

There was no improvising necessary with this kit, nor did improvising seem all that possible. In following the instructions pictorial, I watched myself assemble the thing from outside myself. I looked more like an aggrieved father making it for his child than the child I was when I last played with Legos. Let me stress that my father never got involved with those, though he did have a substantial role in making my model car and other projects.

What Became

I was watching "He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe" the other night while purportedly brainstorming, and thought about the action figures whose sales were the purpose of the show. I had a vast collection of them, and I recall well the large cardboard box which contained them. For a long time it also contained some loose tater tots, which is a fact that I can neither explain or defend. I can merely remember it.

It's more pleasant to remember the action figures. In truth, I don't know that I had watched too much of the show at that time, but the figures certainly entertained me. I would take them out to the backyard and enact adventures all by myself. As my sister was too young to partake (and moreover, was a girl with her own collection of increasingly mangled Barbies), this was the default situation. I was content, if memory serves.

Kid Car

I had to go downtown for a Toastmasters thing the other day. This meant riding the subway line from end to end, which takes something more than half an hour. I brought a lunch (as suggested by event planners) and a book by Henry Miller to occupy myself on the train. This was fine, and the event was fine. What was interesting was the ride back, which tended to impair my ability to read the book, and ultimately my interest in doing so.

While walking through LA Union Station for my return trip, I noticed a sprawling horde of children in matching shirts accompanied by evidently responsible adults. I tried to stay out of their way, giving no thought to where they were headed. I went down to the train and waited for it to come and open its doors. It did so, I entered and I sat down. Then came the hordes. They collectively stormed aboard the train like a revolutionary army. It was quite a thing.

The Laker Street Irregulars

Again I write about my own apartment building, whether anyone wants to hear it or not. I continue to find interest in the people I live around. It's funny the kind of partial connection you have to dozens of people in a place like this. You get to know a lot of people in an extremely narrow and superficial sense.You see them as you're both coming or going. You exchange a couple of words in the laundry room, the lobby, or perhaps the grill area.

Then, in the case of the building's few children, you watch them from a distance as you would any other devastating force of nature. Actually, I guess they're mainly not that bad, but I keep a wary distance even so. In my adult life, I've lived apart from kids more than I've lived among them. Our neighborhood when I was a kid had plenty. The one we moved to from there had few if any. The ones out here in LA have had plenty, but I was not in such close proximity.

Please Be Good Again

The first books with more words than pictures that I can recall reading as a boy were, of course, those of the Hardy Boys. You may well remember them yourselves, but if you don't, it takes little time to grasp the premise. A pair of boys in their late teens are well on their way to following their famous detective father into the business of solving mysteries. The elder boy Frank was the more thoughtful and levelheaded, while Joe was the impetuous and quick to action younger sibling. They had friends, girlfriends, cars, speedboats and a crime lab- as do most American boys in youth.

My father would read the books to me, stopping periodically to show me the illustrations. While I can't recall the acquisition of the first volumes, I can recall the desperate efforts to find subsequent ones which we had not read, and the attempts to induce my father to read each in turn before bed. It naturally grew more and more difficult a task on both points. I would often see exotic titles from the series for sale at the grocery store, but had little choice but to hope that they would become available at the library. At that time, I knew of no way to obtain books from remote branches in the system. There remain many I have not read.

The Beach House

I was fortunate in childhood that we had a beach house in the family. I got to thinking about it as an indirect result of Mother's Day. The gulf between the two things is wide, but I do tend to make leaps in thinking like that routinely, as acquaintances will attest. We went to that beach house often during summers. The memories of my experiences there are some of the fondest I can call upon, and I do so often. There were good times and bad, but I count them all as genuinely formative and truly cherish them.

The house was a modest one, but was warm and inviting. My father and his father built it with their own hands back when there was almost nothing out there and the land was within the means of a college instructor. Because it was built back then, it was much closer to the water than anything built after regulations got more stringent. A light on the back porch did nonetheless have to abide by laws protecting the sea turtles. They get confused by white lights, which I guess look to them like the moon or something.

"Them that die will be the lucky ones!"

When I was a boy, I was as awkward and uncoordinated as you might expect. I really don't think I've gotten any better except that perhaps I now have a better understanding of my limitations. My athletic exploits often resulted in hurt feelings, and less often in getting hurt. There was a lot of gasping for breath during basketball games. I was struck by a thrown ball once in Little League, recovering quickly thanks to the canny direction of the coach to go get a drink of water. I recall aching ankles during grade school intramural flag football, when I was a nose tackle. Even then, I didn't really have the body for it. I guess it reflected the makeup of our team and the attitude of our coach about inclusiveness.

The worst incident took place on a school field trip to the roller skating rink. One laced up the old-fashioned roller skates, and just skated in circles over and over for hours while what it's hard to believe was popular music of the day played over the speakers. I don't recall finding it terribly stimulating. Maybe it was boredom which distracted my focus, for at one point that day, I pitched forward and hit the rink face-first. Conventional human behavior is for reflexes to instinctively take over and force the hands to shoot out and take the impact rather than the critical brain-containing skull. I have always been something of an outlier, and failed to acquiesce to reflexes.