Matthew Burnette, Staff Writer

Legos have been an obsession of mine since I was a kid.

My brother and I had this huge plastic tote that we kept under our bed that was filled nearly to the brim with an assortment of various pieces from different sets we had received over the years.

We would spend hours making houses or cars or whatever other plastic concoctions our developing brains could lead us to snap together.

As I grew older, like with most things from the sunshine and rainbows time of youth, I slowly started to grow out of my desire to put together Lego sets and moved on to more mature and/or worthwhile uses of my time.

I can’t exactly remember what those were, but I’m more than certain the “more mature and/or worthwhile” part is probably a lie. I’m 31, and even now I would argue that a very small percentage of my pursuits could be classified as “mature and/or worthwhile.”

But I digress…

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and everyone was scrambling to find hobbies to keep themselves from going insane due to the prolonged isolation we all experienced, I too found myself looking for a new pastime.

It was an old one, though, that would reenter my life.

I was browsing around Target one day and just happened to find myself in the toy section (remember that whole mature and/or worthwhile thing?). As I turned around the corner into the next aisle, I saw standing on the top shelf as proudly as she does in the New York harbor the Statue of Liberty, only in Lego form.

At that point, it had been at least a decade if not longer since I had put together a Lego set, but the haze and confusion of the pandemic era had hit my brain, and I thought to myself “That might be fun.”

I brought the set home, after paying for it of course, and began assembling Lady Liberty on the dining room table. As I opened the box, the first thing I noticed was that Lego had started putting a multi-tool in every set for pulling apart pieces if need be.

“Kids these days don’t know what it was like back in the day,” I scoffed. “The broken nails and punctured fingertips.”

It was about an hour before I frantically scoured the pile of pieces to find that tool because my now larger and less dexterous fingers couldn’t stand the pain.

Eventually I finished the set and displayed it proudly. I quickly discovered that an old itch had come back that needed scratching.

The next week I purchased the Empire State Building to assemble and display next to my new Statue of Liberty. After that I purchased a couple of sets featuring Batman and other pop culture figures I enjoy like Ghostbusters, the Flintstones and what I considered to be the Holy Grail of Lego sets, The Simpsons House.

The largest sets I managed to put together were the Roman Colosseum at over 9,000 pieces and the Eiffel Tower which easily cleared 10,000 pieces and stood at around four foot high.

At one point I had added up how many pieces I had put together in my new Lego phase of life, and it was well over 50,000, but I’ve done several more sets since then.

While putting together the sets brings me unmeasurable amounts of joy, I noticed something during one of my builds.

I was putting together the Lego Batmobile that was modeled after the 1989 Batman movie starring Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson. On the outside, the finished model is solid black and uniform, just as many items related to Batman happen to be.

But on the inside, the pieces that make up the various mechanical inner workings are a variety of hues and shapes and sizes. They each have their own strengths and purposes no matter how big or small.

You can’t have a complete set if even one of those pieces is missing, a fate I wish on no fellow Lego enthusiast.

And as I sat there examining my recently completed project, I couldn’t help but think that that’s how life is supposed to work.

A multitude of different shapes and sizes and colors coming together for the singular purpose of making something great. They may not all always snap together easily every time, but they come together, nonetheless.

An entire entity made stronger by each individual piece.

I think that’s a pretty cool thing.