Skyward - (NaNoWriMo 2013 Novel)

Building Blocks - (Nov 2, Saturday)

Like mushrooms.

Like stalactites.

"My father would tell me that it had been one of my first words:"

"Highline.

"It took a few years before I got it right, but long before I had, I'd shout my infant equivalent of it at him from where he'd strapped me into the back seat, after he'd picked me up from the daycare where I spent my days lost in a land of unpredictable other children and oceans of toys.

"Blocks. It was always blocks. Lego or Duplo or brick-patterned cardboard ones. The unfathomable other toddlers that toddled through only ever stuck to one kind of block, if they picked them up at all. They would build Duplo and only Duplo. They would build Lego and only Lego. They would build in monochrome, get into hair-pulling spats with one another over all the red or blue or yellow blocks that each would hoard in primary piles. They'd be determine or only build on the stable footing of those broad, green, plastic Lego bases, factory direct from Denmark.

"I never held to such rigid designs. I would hybridize materials, starting from the large and rough foundations of cardboard bricks, to the slightly more refined shapes of duplo, to refined crown moldings rendered in the smallest bricks of Lego. The effect was one of pixelated buildings, though I, of course, didn't have the words for that then. I just loved to build taller and wilder. Being but a toddler, I could only build so high, and that frustrated me to no end until I realized that the things I was building were more than just toys. They were functional, too. Eventually, I realized that I could build ladders for myself to build bigger buildings. I would build one to as tall as I could reach, then build another right beside it so that I could clamber up on the pile of teetering cardboard boxes to make further progress on the first. Up and down I'd clamber on the supporting stack, clutching each progressive block for the next layer in my free, chubby little hand, or in my mouth for cases where both hands we required to climb.

"The first few times I was observed attempting the stunt, the daycare ladies would shriek and tear across the room, plucking me from atop my faulty tower of boxes. They'd inevitably knock the whole mess down in their hurry, and I would be absolutely furious and single-mindedly dedicated to the reconstruction of what they'd just runied. They tried to tell me that I wasn't to do it, and I wouldn't listen. They'd try to take the blocks away, and I'd just find other building materials: plastic horses with legs interlocked or particularly flat matchbox cars. Eventually, they gave up, convinced that I'd eventually fall off one of the towers and learn my lesson better than they could teach it. In all those years at the daycare, I never did.

"I took my inspiration from the towers that surrounded the daycare; even back then, before the first of the true Mega Condos (or megados, as they came to be called), you could hardly find a piece of sky around the street-level daycare. That was fine by me, though. Why would you ever need sky when there was so many fantastic buildings around?

"For all the interlocking, solidly-built pleasure of Lego and Duplo, my absolute favourite was the box of wooden blocks that usually sat forgotten in one corner of the daycare's large playroom. One of the husbands of the daycare ladies was a carpenter, and whenever he had offcut bits of wood, he would hastily sand them down smooth and send them into the daycare. Being a woman who spent all of near every day around children, she knew before I did that I was enamoured with the smooth wooden blocks, and when her husband sent her to work with a couple of new additions for the overflowing box, she would inevitably bring them over to show me before adding them to the collection.

"That high-heaped box of wooden blocks was probably responsible for me growing as quickly as I did when I was a child. Not only did they inspire me to want to build taller, they also built muscle mass as I was forced to drag that box out from the corner every day, and push it back to its home when it came time to leave. I sometimes wonder if the daycare lady with the carpenter husband wasn't assuring a steady stream of new blocks to assure I didn't get ahead of myself: keeping the box just as heavy as I could manage as every day I got a little stronger from dragging the thing around.