LEGOS DOMINATED MY childhood. I was a collector of Legos, as much as any third child can be of any toy that costs more per square inch than hair plugs. My real breakthrough came one day when the boyfriend of an older sister decided to toss off his childish things in the pursuit of manhood, I believe at the ripe old age of sixteen. His loss was my gain, as he came to the house one day bearing an enormous tub of assorted Legos which he then gave to me.

My memory is fuzzy, but I may have peed myself.

What I do remember with remarkable clarity is sitting down with the tub and carefully sorting them out by size and color. My stepfather, an architect and- I like to think- more sympathetic to my desire to sort Legos than anyone else, had taken me to the hardware store for several plastic storage containers. Each had a multitude of tiny clear drawers intended for the separation of different kinds of nails and screws, but mine were full of perfectly sorted Legos.

When it was done, I liked to take a few days just to admire things, and this was my downfall: invariably, another sibling would steal the cases and build something enormous, using up everything in the drawers and often leaving a small trail of one-bumps leading back to the offender's bedroom. Their defense was always that it was so easy to play Legos when they were so nicely sorted, to which I invariably yelled back that I knew that, that's why I had done it.

I'd re-sort and find a better hiding place. And I did actually play with them, instead of just sorting them like a loony. I remember one Father's Day in particular, when I must have had less than nothing to do, creating a Lego card for my stepdad. It used the largest flat board I had, and from the side looked like just a Lego village. Seen from the top, though, the little trees and bushes read 'HAPPY' and the buildings made up the word 'FATHER'S'. The 'DAY' was spelled out by tiny Lego people, all of them raising a teensy plastic goblet in salute.

With four children in the house and busy, professional parents, we were almost always left to entertain ourselves. We only got an original Nintendo (that's right, the NES) one Christmas when I was almost eighteen, and we'd never had electronic toys, with the exception of a hand-crank printing press one of my sisters had gotten for a birthday (there's one episode of the Simpsons where Bart gets his hands on such a device and prints a newspaper with the headline 'Todd Smells'; that typified our level of journalism). Anyway, we were much more resourceful about our entertainment as a result. One sister and I built elaborate clay houses in the backyard mud which we populated by stick people with families and complex, Days Of Our Lives-style dramas; we biked around the neighborhood from sunrise to sunset; we roller-skated through the living room.

In hindsight, it probably all drove my mother crazy. It probably would have been heaven to her to have us to sit quietly in front of the TV blowing up aliens-- although, thinking back now, she never let us watch more than an hour of TV at one time. It's a shame that video games today are so great. When you think of all the funny, silly, dangerous, and above all imaginative things we could be doing instead of sitting in front of a computer screen... well, it's enough to make you want to stop reading blogs and go run through a sprinkler.