In I think 1979, my parents purchased a
small lego set for my eighth birthday. I believe it was set 894, the Mobile
Tracking Station. I do not clearly remember those early days, but set 6841
Mineral Detector and 6861 X-1 Patrol Craft were also present early on.
Those early lego sets quickly became my favourite toys, and favourites by a landslide, so they made easy gift choices for birthdays and Christmases. Without a doubt, the highlight of the calendar year was Christmas Eve, when my sister and I were each allowed to open one gift. The choice was always the gift from our parents, because that was always the biggest, most desirable one. I always knew that gift was going to be a Classic Space set, one of the big ones. In ignorance of the true size of the genre, I set for myself the goal of owning every set in the collection by my twelfth birthday. In my defence, the only inkling I had of how many sets were actually available were the items then on offer in the Consumer’s Distributor’s retail catalogue. That goal obviously wasn’t accomplished.
In what was perhaps an early warning sign of OCD, I kept almost all of the boxes and instructions from those sets. I’m not entirely sure why, but I think I wanted to keep the instructions in case I ever took one of the sets apart and couldn’t get it back together again. I kept the boxes because they seemed like a good place to keep each instruction booklet. And after keeping even just one box and booklet, I felt compelled to keep all of the other ones too. Thank God I did.
Very quickly, I had acquired a couple of crater plates, one or two road and landing pad plates, and a large grey 50x50 base plate. They were all placed together on the floor in the far corner of the basement play room. All the toys were kept there, but there was a special place reserved exclusively for the space lego. This was the moonbase.
At first, in my mind the moonbase was on Earth’s moon, but over time I came to reconsider that. The moon was too close to Earth, too convenient. I felt it more appropriate for the moonbase to be somewhere deeper in space, but I didn’t really know where. And to be honest, my nine or ten year old self didn’t get hung up on those kinds of details.
By the time I reached that eleventh birthday or so, I had stopped playing with the lego in the traditional manner. Instead, I found myself making dioramas with the sets and the minifigures. I would partially dismantle some of the sets and place the minifigures like they were repairing the various ships, buildings, and vehicles. Later on, I would place them in scenes of what I conceived of as just day to day life, fixing something with a big, plastic wrench, driving a space buggy, or refuelling a spaceship. The fact that my parents took an interest in these dioramas greatly encouraged me. I remember being thrilled each time my father took notice of some small detail I had placed, or my mother would comment on what a particular minifigure might be thinking or saying.
As I entered my teen years, I knew that it
was time to put the lego away. While I had not accomplished my goal of owning
every set in the genre, I knew that I had amassed an impressive collection
nonetheless. I knew that someday, I would have a living space of my own (kids could think like that in 1983) where I could set the lego up again as a
permanent display. I carefully pulled the old boxes down from the closet shelf
and returned the dismantled sets to them. One thing I did not do though, was
dismantle any of the minifigures. They went into their respective boxes fully
assembled. I know this sounds completely illogical, but I felt that taking them
apart would be killing them.
At the time, I assumed that I would have a
place appropriate for this new, second display in my early twenties. I assumed
it would be some sort of shelving unit, along the top of a bookcase, or some
such similar thing. When I moved out, I didn’t have room to take the
cardboard storage boxes of space lego with me, so I carefully lined them with
heavy plastic garbage bags to protect from moisture or mice, and stored them at
my parents’ retirement house in the country.
Like most people at that age, I went into a
series of apartments and living spaces that were selected for affordability,
not for displaying lego collections. But it wasn’t that the moon base was completely
forgotten either. I would think about it from time to time, and I even
purchased some sets in my late 20’s, once I started working and had a little
bit of income for such things. I found some new lego sets that would make an
appropriate adversarial faction for the moonbase. I purchased them on line, a
very new and novel concept for me at the time. When they arrived, I promptly put
them into storage with the other sets. I never even opened the shipping box,
let alone the individual sets.
After graduation came marriage, career, and other such adult concerns, and for many years the moonbase truly was forgotten. I moved into a proper house, where there was a large, deep shelf in a storage room where I initially thought I could make a display, but it was soon filled
with other priorities. There were just too many other things to do and attend
to. But no situation is permanent. After the marriage was over and I found
myself alone in that house, I once again remembered a moon base that I had long
ago promised myself that I would build. I pulled the old boxes of lego out from their storage, and got started.