Ephemeral Bulls

and other (imaginary?) communities

A while back, my partner landed a major parenting score: a massive Rubbermaid tub of 1990s vintage Lego, enough to part-fill a foldable wading pool for our kiddo’s birthday party (and, of course, provide the building blocks of many creations, robots, iterations of Voltron, etc. to come). The Legos were the gifts-forward of someone’s husband, finally parting ways with this tub he’d been carting around for his entire adult life. I know they’re from the 1990s because I remember some of the sets and pieces myself, not from my house (we had only “classic” sets, not the ones with cool spaceship pieces—which didn’t stop me from trying to make my own X-wings in a clunky 8-bit sort of way) but from the houses of friends.

There’s other stuff mixed in with the Lego of course. Lego catalogs, for example—the finest graphic design of 1993, kids with geometric print pink shirts and gel in their hair playing with ghost pirate ships—and fragmentary instructions.

But then there’s this little red bull I found yesterday, about the size of a minifig, in a Chicago Bulls jersey, who looks like he’s vaulting over a basketball. He’s designed with a little peg at the bottom, that should fit into some larger piece of plastic—a souvenir cup? A hat? There’s a very specific childhood McDonalds Happy Meal charm to this guy. He predates the mandatory-predation era of sports team mascots. He looks a little chubby.

Or: the afternoon I was searching for a 1x4 blue plate and found an orange d20 in among the pieces. And then, a few weeks later: a d20 *glued* to a Lego piece. A player using Lego in the game somehow? Or a kid whose older brother played, who wanted to sneak that d20 away to use as a wizard’s crystal?

If you’re looking for the truth, rather than a convincing story, it’s dangerous to extrapolate from limited signs—I’m failing as I write this to remember the name or author of the bit of early Sherlock Holmes lampoon (there must be more than one), in which it turns out that the subject of Holmes’ intense dissecting gaze was not in fact an East India merchant marine who visited Thailand in ‘78, he just thought the tattoo looked neat, and his trousers are muddy not because he was running from Scotland Yard but because he’d been splashed by a carriage, and so on, every Holmesian detail explained by another coincidence entirely.

But I’m not seeking a single truth. Each discovery suggests possibilities—glimpses into a range of lives. Maybe these Legos belonged to a kid who loved the Bulls and couldn’t bear to get rid of this little vaulting mascot. Maybe he was the kind of kid whose bookcases and nightstands crowd with collections of wonderful needless plastic objects. Maybe he was just messy.

We’re tangent through these objects, and anonymous to one another—the one thing I know, is that he was willing to pass these toys along to someone who wanted them. I might never meet this guy in person. It’s quite possible that I know him already.

You see these gossamer bonds a lot in parent communities, even where the connections are loose, friend-of-a-friend, lives-one-town-over affairs: a good changing table or travel crib passed from family to family, size 2T shirts recirculating until they take up service as rags. It’s wonderful how much we all are to each other without knowing. How far these webs of ephemera, cause and effect, intention and accident, can spread.

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I subscribed to the New York Review of Books earlier this year—at a professional teaser discount—thinking, I’m weary of these hot takes (and I can’t disappear to Mars), so what if I hunt out the coldest takes around? The kind of takes someone ruminates over for months, painstakingly adjusting commas, then deliver to an editor who I have to imagine wears a vest, just ahead of a print deadline. As a parent the NRYB is a rare intoxicating drug—it’s 40 ccs of Grown-Up right in the vein. Here is a Guy who is going to Discourse about the History of 19th Century English Tourism to Vesuvius, here is Jonathan Lethem describing a conversation he had with Donna Tartt back in college about the novelist Charles Portis. When I unfold the NRYB I go on a reading bender, compelled, just-one-more-article. Yes, yes, review Gabriela Garcia Marquez’s posthumous novel! Tell me about John Singer Sergeant and his buddies performing Tristan in their shirt-tails at 2 in the morning in Tuscany! Once this sort of thing felt like the core of my existence—now it’s a resort vacation. Anyway, I tried to find a gift link and I’m not sure I managed, but here’s a delightful historical overview of the screwball comedy, which makes me feel a moral imperative to track down more Loy/Powell films, and rewatch His Girl Friday, and find a copy of The Lady Eve.

Part of the fantasy and promise of the screwball comedy, it seems to me, is how it veers away from the tense silences and inexpressibilities of the domestic realist marriage novel: here, let’s imagine people who talk to one another—easily, eloquently, joyfully, discursively, cuttingly, hilariously, at length.

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Wicked Problems is out in audio! Narrated, as was Dead Country, by Janina Edwards. You can get it at Audible or libro.fm, or Apple or anywhere fine audiobooks are sold. Happy listening!