Pieces of Mind

My mother often says that my first love was Lego, the colourful interlocking bricks that have been manufactured since 1949. It’s a love that I never outgrew, and I doubt I ever will. Indeed, as the legendary Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter told the Financial Times not long ago, “You can’t spend enough money on Lego.”

When I was just five or six years old, I learned that Lego came from Denmark, specifically a small town on the Jutland peninsula called Billund, a world away from the basement in which I assembled and reassembled castles and pirate ships and where my brother worked tirelessly on his model of the University of Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium (this was when our team was still good). There I pored over magazines filled with pictures of the original Legoland theme park, with its 1:20 replicas of Amalienborg, Neuschwanstein, and Abu Simbel, exotic landmarks that I never expected to see in person. I studied the park’s Mount Rushmore, Cape Canaveral, and United States Capitol, which I thought, maybe, I would someday visit. And I was inspired to let my imagination run free, just like millions of others.

I will remember many things about this year past — celebrating my birthday in the Sierras Pampeanas of Argentina, exploring Jasper on a sunny morning before fire season, saying goodbye to my last surviving grandparent, enjoying scallops in Digby with two of my favourite people, watching Americans send a vindictive autocrat back to the Oval Office — but the memory that most fills me with joy is finally going to the Lego House museum and nearby Lego headquarters in Billund.

The name Lego is, fittingly, a constructed term, derived from the Danish leg godt (play well). It’s a word that the company’s founder, Ole Kirk Christiansen, began using in 1932, when he was still selling wooden toys, including his iconic duck on wheels. One day, Ole Kirk’s son Godtfred Kirk took an order of the rolling stock to the train station, boasting upon his return that he’d just saved his dad some money. “How did you manage that?” Ole Kirk asked. “I gave the ducks just two coats of varnish, not three as we usually do!” his son replied. To which Ole Kirk said, “You’ll immediately fetch those ducks back, give them the last coat of varnish, pack them, and return them to the station. And you’ll do it on your own — even if it takes you all night!”

Godtfred Kirk Christiansen quickly internalized his father’s lesson about excellence and integrity. In fact, he carved a sign that would remind himself and his co-workers: “Det bedste er ikke for godt” (Only the best is good enough). It’s a motto emblazoned throughout Lego House and an ethos that continues to define the company all these years later.

I’m told that I was like a kid in a candy store when I first set foot in Lego House, not knowing where to look and wanting to sample everything all at once. Designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group — the firm behind the Vancouver House tower and a major redevelopment along Toronto’s King Street West — the award-winning museum is filled with some 25 million bricks, an exclusive shop and one-of-a-kind restaurant, and countless archival sets from the past seventy-five years. But in the months since my pilgrimage, it’s the sight of Godtfred Kirk’s original wooden sign that keeps coming back to mind.

It’s increasingly difficult to reconcile those six simple words with the reality that I see around me. In Toronto, where I have lived longer than anyplace else, our parks are falling into disrepair, our streets are crumbling, our transit projects are years behind schedule, and our traffic gets worse by the day. Elsewhere in Canada, dozens of water advisories remain in place across far too many First Nations communities, our national sports teams use drones to spy on the competition, and our public broadcaster scrambles to justify its continued existence while airing derivative schlock. Is this really the best we can do?

Deepening my unease are those elections recent and forthcoming. Watching candidates and pundits spar is like watching juiced sprinters race to the bottom, where bromides and cults of personality have gained more currency among the electorate than practical policy proposals and meaningful collaboration. It’s as if the various pieces of democracy no longer work together.

Perhaps that’s the other thing I so admire about Lego: every piece ever made works with every other piece, whether from my prized Black Seas Barracuda of 1989 (set no. 6285) or from the Botanical Garden that I’m hoping someone gives me for Christmas (set no. 21353). Quality is not inherently elitist, and it need not be divisive. Solutions can be found through the imaginative combination of parts that, initially, don’t seem like they could fit together. Only the best is good enough — at least, that’s an aspiration I will hold on to as we weather the coming storms.