A recent post by Chris Pirillo described one of his favorite memories, where he got his first LEGO set.

I, too, was once a LEGO fanatic. From early childhood and up to my late youth, I’ve have LEGO sets in a wide variety. At some point, my parents even got me a big storage sack; when placed onto the floor, the pieces laid out in the open on a big, flat fabric circle, and when I was done playing for the day, we just gathered up wayward pieces to the center of the pile, grabbed all the rope loops surrounding the edges of the fabric, and lifted it up to make a nice sack to hang on a knob or some other safe storage place. You know, like this one.

Anyway, I can recall what my first LEGO set was. It was in 1983, I had recently turned 3, and my baby sister was just born (my birthday’s in mid-February, she was born in mid-March). Granted, my memory is rather vague (no specific details), but I recall this LEGO set in particular. We called it my Postman Pat LEGO car, although it had no actual relation to the TV show. It just looked kinda the same.

You can see the similarity, right? The Postman Pat image is from Wikipedia, the LEGO set images are from Peeron. Still copied off without any permission whatsoever.

I remember showing off this toy to my mom while visiting the hospital right after my sister was born, and I was quite hung up on dismantling and building this set over and over (this part of the memory is filled in through stories my mom has told me, though). It was the start of my creativity as I know it today, and thinking back, I wouldn’t want to be without having LEGO in my life.

Now I’m grown up, and even though I had a recurring stint of buying LEGO sets about 10 years ago (yes, in my early twenties), these were donated to a local school during a major cleanup operation at home, and I believe my original bag of LEGOs were given to my almost-step-brother (his mother and my dad weren’t married, they just lived together from the time he was less than a year until his early school days – his mother and my dad did have my youngest sister together in that time, though).

I no longer own any LEGO sets, but the memories remain. I would always be able to recommend LEGO sets to parents with young children.