The room that I shared with one of my brothers was at the top of the stairs in our home. It was long and narrow, so our twin beds were arranged along one wall footboard to footboard, leaving an aisle that led to a pair of reasonably sized closets at the far end. We had matching chests of drawers in our closets and the drawers were organized in a similar manner. The top drawer contained undershorts and socks. Since there were four boys in our home, we each had a distinctive color for the stripes on our white crew socks. My socks had one black stripe and one red stripe. The brother with whom I shared the room had one black stripe and one blue stripe. The second drawer was for t-shirts and a few other shirts that were kept folded. Mostly we had white t-shirts. There weren’t many colored ones and very few with logos on them. Most of our shirts hung on hangers, but we wore white t-shirts under them. The third drawer was for jeans. Good jeans on the left, play jeans on the right. The play jeans mostly had patches on the knees. Each year a couple of pairs of jeans were given the honor of becoming cutoffs for summer play.

The fourth drawer, however, was our own. It was a storage place for our special toys. We had some other places where toys were stored, but the drawer in the chest was reserved for toys that the other boys, especially our youngest brothers, were not allowed to play with unless they had special permission from us.

My drawer was mostly filled with erector sets and parts. The tiny nuts and bolts with their little screwdriver and wrench were in a metal box. There was an ample supply of girders that were loose in the drawer and eventually I got a wind-up motor and a plug-in motor with gears and pulleys to use in making cranes and other constructions.

My brother, a little more than two years younger, devoted his bottom drawer to lego bricks. He could get a slightly abused tone in his voice if you called them blocks, saying, “They aren’t blocks! They are bricks!” I was eight or nine years old when Samsonite began producing Legos in the United States, but my brother was just the right age to begin collecting the bricks. In those days most bricks were either red or white and they came predominantly in a couple of sizes, which allowed for the construction of buildings with windows and doors and other specialty parts. I did my share of playing with his bricks, as we shared a train set and often made structures to go with our train layouts.

When I grew up and our son was born, Lego was the most common and best designed of all construction sets for children. The bricks now came in many different colors and there were sets for constructing all kings of specialty projects. Some were themed around the popular star wars movies. Others were devoted to building castles. There were motors and wheels and other specialty parts that could be used to construct everything from boats to trucks and more. Both of our children enjoyed playing with legos, and I enjoyed playing with them. it wasn’t long before there were more Lego bricks in our home than would fit in a single dresser drawer. I built a special table with an edge rail to contain the bricks and provide a surface for building.

Our children have grown and our son has children of his own, but most of the Lego bricks remain in our home. We’ve given some of them to his son, but the tiny parts are a bit too small for our granddaughter at this age, so they have to be carefully supervised in their home.

When our children and grandchildren came to visit early this year, we devoted a table in the basement to Lego construction. Once again I realized the size of the inventory that was present in our house. After the visit, I read a couple of articles about Lego toys and different theories of how best to organize the toys for maximum play value. There was a sense that some organization, such as sorting by color, enhanced the creative play the was possible from the bricks. Some advocated sorting by size rather than color. There are even a few fanatic Lego fans who have complex systems to sort by color and size.

So, from time to time, usually at the end of a long day when I am very tired, I sort Lego bricks. For the last week or so, I’ve been sorting the parts that are used to make up little people. The figures don’t look very much like real people, but have tiny arms and hands that can be separated. The heads come off and can be interchanged. The legs can be removed as a pair and separated. There are lots of hats and capes and other accessories and a host of things that can be held in the figures’ hands. We have flags and spears and bows and guns and wands and lots of other tiny specialty parts. I found a few plastic boxes with compartments that were suitable for sorting.

I decided to leave some of the figures fully assembled, though the bins that stored the legos were filled with a lot of figures with missing parts. At one point, I got to laughing about the number of headless bodies in our basement along with a corresponding number of severed heads and limbs. I put a lot of the figures back together but then decided that having a few of the tiny parts unassembled made for creative fun for playing, so have now dedicated bins to head and arms and legs and other body parts that can be assembled when grandchildren come to visit. Sorting the Legos is a silly, but thoroughly entertaining task made even more fun by imagining the play that will come from the toys.

I realize that the task of sorting is a luxury for which parents can’t possibly have time. They do well to work with their children to get all of the bricks picked up and put into bins. Grandparents’ houses, however, can have luxuries of organization that come from the time between visits.

After all, grandpa still loves to play with Legos. He even plays with them when the grandchildren aren’t around.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.