The Lego Cat

"Is there any greater satisfaction than fulfilling the purpose for which we were made?"

When I got the call from the school nurse at noon saying Levi was complaining of a stomachache and asking to come home, I knew exactly what was going on. Levi never went to the school nurse—which was probably why she called—and earlier that morning as he was getting ready for school, he’d asked if he could skip to build his Lego cat.

It was the set my mom had given him for his eighth birthday—a 1,700 piece life-size tuxedo cat designed for adults eighteen and up. Levi had begged Caleb and me for it for weeks, but because of the price, we’d said no. So when it showed up on our doorstep yesterday evening, it was all he could think about.

“I’ll come get him,” I told the school nurse. As a writer, I understood the power of Levi’s passion—how his need to build his Lego cat would consume him unless given the time to work on it.

I gave him a knowing smile, which he returned with one of immense thanks, when I picked him up from school. At home, he set up his station at the work table in Caleb’s shop.

“This isn’t like the other sets you’ve built,” I told him as he flipped open the instructions. “It’s for people much older than you, so expect it to take several days.”

Without looking up, he said, “I’m going to build the whole thing today.”

I knew he would. Like me, Levi is the oldest and Type A. When he sets out to do something, he’s going to do it—come hell or high water. As he started assembling the cat, I thought back to when he was six months old, and I couldn’t get him to eat his applesauce or sweet potatoes because of a loose bolt on his highchair he’d discovered and kept trying to tighten. As a toddler, he spent hours each day building with Duplos, designing cars, trucks, boats, and planes with precise symmetry and color patterns. When he was three, he went around the house with his junior toolkit and disassembled—then reassembled—the coffee table, island stools, and the Ikea kids’ table and chairs.

As he got older, he moved on to Lego sets with tiny pieces, and when those became too easy, he returned to building his own designs—battleships, army trucks, RVs. He drew detailed instruction manuals for many of them.

He was born with the gift to design and build, is what it boiled down to—and now, at eight years old, he was upping his game.

That night at 8 p.m., when the other three were in bed, Levi came up from the workshop into the living room, where Caleb and I sat reading. He held his completed Lego cat out like a trophy for us to behold.

“Incredible job,” said Caleb, a mechanical engineer who was also a Lego enthusiast as a boy. “You should be really proud.”

You could tell by the look on Levi’s face that he was. That he’d completed not only what he’d set out to do, but what he was made to do—his calling to create through the art of building with his hands and his mind.

Is there any greater satisfaction than fulfilling the purpose for which we were made?

I motioned to his dinner on the table and winked. “How’s your stomachache?”

Levi had asked Caleb for an “army man haircut” for his birthday, and like a dedicated soldier, Levi didn’t stop working on his Lego cat until that mission was complete.