Long, long ago, about 10 years to be exact, a young boy enters his creation into the county fair with the hopes of taking home the blue ribbon. Once it is entered he wanders off in search of the prime location to set it so that the judges can bask in its glory. He goes home later that night and for the next three days he sits and bites at his nails nervously waiting to hear that the rankings have been posted. As soon as he does, he rushes to look at his masterpiece and finds a lone red ribbon on it. He got second place yet again.
This wasn’t the first nor would it be the last, but there were many victories yet to come. At the age of five all I did with my spare time was play with Legos. I had buckets and boxes full of them. At times it was even difficult to walk around in my bedroom because my floor was covered with pieces of Lego; I don’t know how many times I stepped on them. My bedroom was set up so that I had a lot of room after the end of my bed where I could play, and play I did. As soon as you walked through the door it seemed to me like walking into heaven, or Legoland, being that I had little “stations” set up for different projects.
Throughout the year, I would make different things: buildings, statues, creatures; anything a person could think up in their imagination. Each year at the beginning of August, I would think through all of the things I had made during the past year, then recreate the ones I thought were the most complex and cool to rebuild and submit them to the county fair. There were multiple size categories, so I was able to enter more than one of my creations. The categories were based on complexity, or how many pieces the entry had. Therefore, I was able to use three different pieces of my work.
One was very small, only about seventy-five pieces, it somewhat resembled a spaceship, the largest one was over a thousand pieces, this was a large imaginative cityscape, and the other was somewhere in-between, this one was not that memorable of a piece. After I had entered in, I went to take a gander at my competition. Many were impressive, though some were just builds that you bought from the store with instructions, such as: space ships from Star Wars, scenes from Indiana Jones, or farms with a large barn with animals in it.
Later, I went home and went on with the rest of my week waiting in anticipation for Sunday when I could go and see how my building skills were. Thankfully my mother knew how important this was to me and took me to the fair each day so that I could jaunt around and behold all of the marvels people had enrolled to give me new ideas of what to compose for next year. The moment we arrived on Sunday, I dashed to find my entries. To my stupefaction, there was a blue ribbon on my hefty make. Even though the others were red and green ribbons, I was ecstatic!
I brought three projects home and after displaying the winner for close to a month, I disassembled all of them and was on my way to new and better creations. It was the closest thing I had to a trophy, so I cherished it. I bragged about my accomplishment at school by pinning the bright blue ribbon to my backpack and bringing the other less fortunate warriors of the fair for show-and-tell. Over the next year, I tried making more intricate, complex buildings rather than trying to win by sheer mass.
The end results were stupendous airplanes and ornate vehicles, these took me much longer to manufacture, and the end result gave me a feeling of deep accomplishment. Signing in to the competition the next year was much more difficult than before because of how intricate my designs were. I was forced to simplify my designs to be allowed to enter them in multiple size categories because of how many small parts there were. I actually lied on one of them because I felt like it would be a dishonor to the build if I took pieces off.
To my utter disappointment, that year I unfortunately did not make even third place with any of my works of art. The top three places were: The Millennium falcon in first place, a large Godzilla looking build in a ruined town in second, and a calm, cool beach scene in third. Skip forward quite a few years to when I was age thirteen. My handiwork consisted of: dragons, exo-suits, and realistic cityscapes. Now that I am older, the difficulty of beating my peers has become more challenging, though with greater reward.
Since there is now money involved, for first through third place, the children I faced in my younger years have upped their game and invest more time and effort into their builds, just as I have done my whole life. Once I enroll my new generation of competitors, I go on with my normal life for the next couple of days hoping that I’ll be lucky this year, since the last couple haven’t been to good. I return at the end of the week and am disappointed to find that I was not up to par for the second year in a row. Year after year, I would enter new works thinking that they would be powerful and bewilder the judges.
As the challenge becomes tougher each year, I grow with it and become a better competitor against my peers. I don’t have as much free time to spend building, so when I do it is very intense. I have earned a fairly decent amount of money while competing, though most of it has been spent on more Legos. Looking back, it still seems like my most successful masterpiece was still the city I made at five. I await the new challenge to create something I haven’t before and look towards the future and the friends, enemies, and ideas to come.
