I miss the neighborhood manhunt games.
I miss the tasty milk in the glass bottles that the milkman delivered to the metal container on our front porch.
I miss knowing that as a little girl, I could go to any house in our neighborhood if I needed help and I would be safe and cared for until my Mom could come and get me.
I miss sitting outside on a warm Summer day with my best friend, eating Buddig beef sandwiches and drinking Rootie root beer.
Sigh
I miss going to my grandparents’ house early on a Saturday morning. My grandpa would have got off the night shift at the plant at 7:00. By the time we arrived, he would have been home for about an hour. When you walked in the door, the house smelled like a wondrous combination of freshly-percolated coffee, toast with peanut butter, and pipe smoke. He’d be sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper. That’s a nice memory.
I don’t miss anything else about the arrangement, but I certainly miss the experience of living with a guy who liked to do dishes and who provided backrubs and cuddling on demand.
I miss winter vacations, when I could do nothing for two weeks but wake up at noon and spend all day in pyjamas, wrapped in a blanket, reading. (And the same for summer vacations, but sans blanket.) All-day reading sessions are now generally curtailed to Harry Potter release days.
I miss long rides with my sister, listening to the radio and talking about everything under the sun as she drove way too fast, and feeling like the two of us had come a million miles from our hellish childhoods
I miss the expectant look on my friend face as I bit into one of her deserts (or meals) and my knowing it will be among the best food I will ever eat.
I miss going to another friends house (The mother of one of my friends) house for thanksgiving and christimas (after thanksgiving or christmas at my Mom’s house) and feeling like I was totally accepted and knowing what a holiday is supposed to feel like.
Sometimes It’s good to reflect on dead friends and siblings
I also miss bedroom romps with two of of the people I was involved with in my late teens (together or seperately) I don’t miss them so much as that first tast of sexual freedom and being desired. (I am curious as to what eventually became of them.) I love my boyfriend and have no desire to be unfaithfull I should add.
I miss summer nights in central California when I was growing up, floating on my back in the pool and just watching the stars. My ears would be under water, so all I could hear was my breathing and heartbeat. I would float like that for what seemed like hours while my mind wandered and wondered.
I miss cheesesteaks at The Bomber House, with just the right amount of dirty grease and customers.
I miss the crisp fall air of a fireman’s carnival, playing the quarter-drop game.
I miss the ozone and endless possibilities of the video game parlor, wondering what new adventures lay ahead of me.
I miss happy techno.
I miss being six years old and walking with just my sister to the beach area at my grandparents bungalow community and, as we got closer, hearing the big pumps that kept the bay water moving in and out of the bulkheaded area so that we didn’t have to deal with jellyfish and seaweed. A few years later they ruined it by getting rid of the pumps, dredging and hitting a spring and making it all cold and moldy.
Sleeping like a child, all boneless and impossible to wakeup.
Skipping college classes to drink beer - it just isn’t the *same *skipping work to drink beer.
I miss the summer when I ‘helped’ my Grandpa build his Model T. We’d spend the entire day in antique auto graveyards picking through cans and bins for “The” necessary bolt or part he needed. We’d come home dusty and oily with that unique auto shop smell that I have always loved. He’d show me how to clean the part and where it went. He did the assembly (he wanted it to actually run!). I remember the day we started to sew the seats. We were in front of the sewing machine and he was all thumbs. Much Czech cursing ensued. Grandma came down, helped me figure out the machine. Somewhere in Texas is my Model T with seats sewn by a 10 year old.
Walking through cool dewy grass barefooted with popsicle in hand.
Playing kick the can at dusk, our group of 10-15 kids running around the block looking for the perfect hiding spot. Mine was up in a neighbors willow tree or between the garages of the “scary” families down the street. All of our parents would congregate on someones patio or stoop. Guys drank beer, women drank coffee. When I was “It” I would go past the parents slowly so my dad could nudge his head towards where people were hiding.
I miss the fire.
I feel the embers and recall the heat, but I miss the fire.
I miss being able to skip the rest of that day’s classes and get the notes from friends because my GF and I had decided to make love all afternoon in my dorm room. I miss that time: all that fear about the future resolving within each others arms. Even the pregnancy scare & the drunken roomates/friends. The world held endless possibilities then, and they all seemed to drift into the room through the half-open window on a sweet spring breeze as we rested, wrapped around each other, under my thick winter quilt.
I miss sitting out in our backyard in early summer evenings as a kid and a teenager, in a chaise longue next to our little pool, and reading. Didn’t matter what I was reading (though The Three Investigators books were always at the top of my list during the younger times)–just the peaceful reading time was really nice.
I would also like to relive my second year in college, when I was part of an amazing RPG with several friends and a genius GM. The game utterly consumed my life that year (and I think those of the friends as well) and was one of the more intense periods I’ve ever gone through. We played almost constantly, whenever we weren’t in class, and all of us still managed to get top grades while doing it. 'Course, it helped that I met my spouse in this game, but the intensity and closeness of the whole group is what I’d like to relive.
Last friday I was slow dancing in Davis Ca on the sidewalk to non-existing music with this beautiful girl I met earlier in the week.We talked all week on the phone then we met up in Davis.Walked and talked.It was a warm evening about 10:30pmish.There were college kids everywhere.Then we spotted a rotating light in a residential house-turned store.She mentioned that it reminded her of the dance floor.So we slow-danced for like 20min and shared kisses.
The next day she emailed me saying that Im too “conservative” for her.I wish I could re-live that nite because now shes gone…
Riding shotgun in my brother’s car, listening to They Might Be Giants and singing along.
Staying up til 5am, playing Wasteland, then getting up at 3pm and… playing Wasteland.
The feeling after my very first kiss. It was with a fellow Doper, though neither of us were Dopers in those days.
Hell, the feeling after my first kiss with anyone. There is a downside to a stable relationship.
The taste of a Hostess cupcake. There’s a trendy dessert bakery in town that serves a cake i like to describe as, “tasting like a Hostess cupcake did when i was 8”. Unfortunately, it costs a lot more.
Sitting in a boat with eight others on a cold spring morning, waiting for the ref to say, “GO!” and being too amped to notice or care about anything else in the world.
Crossing the finish with my heart about to burst and my limbs screaming for mercy, collapsing in my seat, then looking around and thinking, “oh hey, we won!”
Waking up every single morning with the thought, “what do i want to do today?”
I miss being the best at counterstrike among my friends.
I miss being able to ejaculate every twenty minutes.
I miss all the wonderful things that came along with visiting Iceland during the summer. The safety to head out the door and walk downtown (as long as I left a note saying where I was going) without anybody to supervise me. Picking berries in the middle of nowhere out past the summerhouses. Visiting my uncle’s horse farm and taking walks with the dogs, or reading in a quiet patch of sunlight on the deck. Feeling the summer rains mist around me as I walked along a muddy country road. The crisp feeling of the wind in my face. Everything felt so alive, so stark, so wonderful.
That’s funny. I was thinking a burst appendicitis on the rack would be more pleasant.
As long as the OP was mentioning listening to music whiile reading, I read the Chronicles of Narnia while listening to my sisters collection of [shame]Menudo[/shame]. For some reason it worked. “Like a Canonball”…
On a related note–I don’t miss anything else about the arrangement, but I miss the experience of living with a girl who was happy to exchange backrubs and cuddles with me on demand. Unfortunately, neither of us liked to do dishes. That was but one of the many things wrong with that arrangement. But oh, those cuddles!
I’m really enjoying reading these. It’s awesome to see people with such positive memories.
I miss the experience of my first basketball game in high school–the first time I’d ever played a real game on a real, organized team. (I’d never been interested in sports until middle school.) After spending a couple of years glued to every sports contest I could find on TV, no matter how mundane or what sport, and being awed by all those athletes–I finally was one. I was wearing a jersey–my own jersey! There were days when I would spend hours and hours just staring at my jersey hanging from my dresser, visualizing myself winning championships–and expensive specialized shoes, and I was on a real team in a real game on a real, full-sized basketball court with fans–watching me! No big deal to the kids who played Pee Wee and T-ball as toddlers; but to me, who had only ever known sports games as big events for an immensely priveleged few to participate in, it was like meeting St. Peter at the pearly gates and finally understanding the things that had mattered so much to me for so long.
The court looked so big! I subbed in at halftime, with the team holding onto a slim lead, and everything happened so fast from there. The next thing I knew it was the fourth quarter and we were up by two points and the big European forward from Preuss (a lame rivalry of sorts between two charter schools that didn’t really have much use for sports) was charging at the hoop, and I stood in his face and slapped the ball away from him right before getting bowled over and hitting the ground hard. I had made the stop and now I was taking free throws. Even though I missed both badly, I felt like a superhero for that moment. Later I watched the other late-substitute guy the coach didn’t have much stock in (can’t remember his name for the life of me) make a three late in the fourth quarter to seal the victory. The look on his face was unmistakeable.
I felt a fire under my feet the whole time I was in that game, one like I’d never felt before or since.
I miss being able to call dad for advice. Just last week I ran into a thorny problem building a rec room in the basement, and I actually picked up the phone to call him (we was a carpenter) until my wife reminded me he died two years ago.
For some reason I associate playing Half Life 2 with hearing bjork.
I don’t ever remember doing that but If I did I miss it.