Life of Dave: A Little Blue Bag

Since catching up with the past 4-1/2 seasons of Breaking Bad (we started just after Christmas), we decided to see what else was on Netflix. The Canadian version of this service isn't quite as up to snuff as the US version so I'm told, but we did run across Jeff Who Lives at Home. Quite an entertaining movie. When it was initially released and I saw the trailer I remember thinking I'd like it, and I did. It's a bit slow at the beginning, but it does draw you in. It kinda reminded me of Punch Drunk Love with Adam Sandler. (I normally avoid his movies, but there have been about three (out of about 500) that I've liked.)

Anyway, I had a rather odd experience the other day regarding finding some long-lost (and rather forgotten) items over the weekend that, in retrospect, I would tend to attribute to a theme in that movie.

Jeff, the central figure in the movie, is somewhat of a misunderstood layabout. A name gets stuck in his head at the beginning of the day that he thinks he must follow in order to understand some larger picture. He follows various trails of "Kevin" to the end of the movie, and of course, emerges victorious.

My Easter long weekend was drastically different from Jeff's, but I did seem to ruminate on one subject after it sort of appeared in my head over night. I had been building Lego trucks with my nephew...or rather, I had been building them and he'd been playing with them. After the build session I was thinking about all the small kits that had gone into my semi-large stash of blocks. When we were kids my cousin (coincidentally also named Jeff) and I would spend our time building trucks. We fine-tuned our basic design to always incorporate fenders and a certain type of door. I had forgotten where those specialized pieces came from.

Then, for some unexplainable reason, I started to think about a small blue canvas-type bag I'd had as a child. I wasn't even completely sure what it had contained, but I guessed it had been Lego. The image of that small blue bag stayed with me all day.

As the weekend ended I decided I'd ride my bike to work the next day, and promptly set about searching for my panniers. I haven't ridden to work since probably September, and do you think I could find those stupid panniers? I searched all the usual suspects. Shelves, drawers, storage rooms, closets. And cabinets. And that's where I found the little blue bag. It's heft and fluidity suggested it was a bag of marbles, which it was, except that it also contained many small colour brochures issued by Lego in and around 1970, mostly for small trucks, tractors, trains and cars. Talk about a score! Quelle vintage time capsule!

There's power in the sub-conscious mind. It goes to work when we're sleeping, weaving together seemingly random thoughts, events and even sensations. It creates associations and neural connections far too complex to be explained by the likes of me. My wonderfully relaxing 4-day sunny (!) weekend (this season's first application of sunscreen, btw) included dining out, hosting the family Easter dinner, building (Lego, and also continuating with basement renovations), jogging, playing with my dog and planning to ride my bike on Tuesday morning. All of it somehow coalesced overnight into one conscious thought; a blue Lego bag, culminating with the bonus discovery of vintage Lego brochures I'd forgotten I'd kept since childhood.