My dogs. 
My daddy. He drowned nine days before my sixth birthday. I miss him just like it happened yesterday.
My grandparents. They died within eight weeks of each other only days before I turned eighteen.
My best friend. Although she died after I was out of childhood, I had known her since I was three. She had two months to go before she would have turned twenty-one.
On a lighter note: I miss riding bikes all day on Saturdays, not having anything else to do. I miss pretending I was Elton John as I practiced on the piano. I miss telling ghost stories at spend-the-night parties, and playing “Light As A Feather”. I miss having the biggest boobs in the class! I miss playing football with all the guys and being damn good at it. I was always picked first. I really miss that.
I miss singing along with The Carpenters…knowing I sounded just like Karen and writing plays for my class. I miss going to drive-in movies and driving around until the sun set with my boyfriend. Such a cool car. Such great 8-tracks!
I miss driving my sister to school and singing along with Aerosmith…the same album, every day. I miss Queen. I miss Lynyrd Skynyrd, the original band. I miss Jim Croce. I miss crying over Cat Stevens and Seals and Crofts during the summer nights.
I miss CB radios.
Waxing nostalgic? Me?
I miss poking holes in the jar lid and catching lightning bugs. I miss running around the neighborhood playing 21 tag. I miss getting together with all my cousins at my grandparents’ house every Sunday and playing Spud, Kickball and Colored Eggs.
I miss recess at school - playing tag, having races and jumping rope to “Down in the Valley”. I miss the days of being embarrased to like a boy even in the 5th grade. I miss the days where it didn’t matter what you wore.
I miss the days when you went to baseball practice with cleates and a glove only - coach provided the bats and helmets and the sponsor paid for everything!
I miss the days of being able to walk blocks away from home to go to the store and buy penny candy without worrying that you may never see your family again.
I miss taking an apple and a book up into a tree and staying there for hours.
I also miss Pop Rocks and Eskimo Pies. I realize that I could have those now, but they’ll never be as good as they were when I was eight and had just chased down the ice cream man.
I miss feeling like the richest person on earth because I had a quarter in my pocket.
I miss lunchtimes at school with the friends I never or hardly ever see anymore.
I miss rolling down hills and running around and not caring about getting covered in mud and grass stains because I didn’t have to do the laundry after.
I miss building treehouses, playing Tiggy on the Fence at a friend’s house and playing Hide and Seek around the whole suburb, using bikes.
I miss waterbomb fights on hot days, esp. the ones at school.
I miss camp.
I miss when Christmas was really exciting and you couldn’t get to sleep the night before.
I miss staying up late on Friday nights to watch TV in the spare room and eventually falling asleep in there.
I miss getting up early on Saturday mornings to watch The Real Ghostbusters.
I miss swingsets.
I miss thinking I had all the time in the world and nothing was particularly urgent or important.
Like MadnessIsAVirtue, I miss the untempered thrill of Christmas. Also:
Reading my favorite books over and over.
Swimming at the public pool.
Cicadas and thunderstorms on summer nights.
The NFL. (I know it’s still around, but I don’t pay attention anymore.)
Band practice.
Riding my bike aimlessly around town.
Watching Star Trek reruns (before we knew to call it TOS) and playing with the Meco action figures.
Four-square.
Most of all I miss my brother, who died when he was 9 (I was 12).
I’ll second or third the idea of time.
Not just having that three months off every year, but the fact that those three months seemed like they just went on forever. There was always time to get around to whatever, and most times, you really did get around to it.
I remember trails, and hidden forts in the woods, and those four or five places around town where you could genuinely be alone for an hour or two, and all this stuff was within walking distance of home.
Taking off for the day with two dollars in your pocket, and not coming home until dinner time was no big deal. Nobody was worried about what might have happened to you, since nothing could happen, right? It wasn’t so much the lack of responsibility as the lack of risk. You could spend six or eight hours wandering around town, with some friends or on your own, at the age of nine or ten, and it was no big deal.
And as some others have mentioned, there’s one friend I really miss. The kid with the abusive, alchoholic father (though none of the rest of us really knew the whole truth at the time). The kid that, though he was the same age as the rest of us, we all kind of thought of him as a little brother; we all looked out for him, 'cause he had it rough at home. The summer that we were ten, in August, he just reached the end of his… his ability to cope, I guess.
I don’t think most of us knew what suicide meant, until that summer.
Every now and then I wonder how Joey would have turned out, if things had been just a little different.
Morning Glories.
We had a huge old house with a Morning Glory bush (and lilacs, and…)
I was always amazed how they knew to open at dawn and then close back up - magic right there, in the back yard.
Peanuts (thanks, Sparky!)
4th of July (illegal, and therefor ultra cool) fireworks - roman candles, cherry bombs…
The treehouse…
but mostly: Hope, Faith, that stuff.
I miss those endless days when the good weather stretched into eternity, when you could do anything or nothing and be content.
I miss the feeling that I had then, before I realized that someday I too would have to die.
I miss my grandparents too. I just buried my grandfather two weeks ago and when I saw folks here mentioning grandparents it started the waterworks, because I miss them so much. I miss my grandmother holding me in her lap and stroking my hair with those cool, cool hands that looked like older versions of my own. I miss my grandfather letting me into the little chicken house to gather eggs, walking through his few rows of corn, sucking his teeth or cracking the jokes my grandmother had long tired of. I miss the dog they used to have, which was really my uncle’s dog but they all lived on the same property and my grandmother took care of it. That dog was so sweet… died a week after my grandmother.
There are so many people from my childhood that I loved that I no longer get to see, for some reason or another. And I’m so pitifully grateful to have had them at all, to have loved and been loved by them, because childhood was so hard. So hard. I wouldn’t be who I am, I wouldn’t have the potential I do, if not for them. And I miss them terribly, especially those that I know I won’t see in the flesh again. I want them back. I want more endless days with them. They were the sweetest part of everything.
I too miss playing outside. We had 3 acres of rain forest filled with berries to eat and trees to climb. I used to disappear for hours.
I really miss being innocent. Now I’ve got all these things to think and worry about, man it sucks. My biggest care at 5 was whether or not I would have to take my pants off because I tied myself to the rope swing to play superman and couldn’t untie it.
Sleeping with my head at the foot of the bed near the open window – with the fan blowing over my baby doll pajamas.
Coming in from the cold with my family and all four of us huddling on the furnace grate together to warm up fast.
The Double Bubble in Daddy’s pocket when he came home from the store.
Sitting on the steps with a salt shaker and bending over to eat a whole fresh homegrown tomato.
Linus on horseback, racing our car to the top of the hill.
Dear fellow grownup kids, I double dog dare you to find that which is memorable and priceless in the present.
Growing up near an airbase in the 70’s, I miss the sonic boom of the NF-5’s and F-16’s blasting overhead. Also, I miss watching paratroopers practice in the moors 500 yards away from my parents’ house. They’d get picked up by these giant Chinooks. Me and my best friend would lay on the ground in front of them as they took off. Sometimes, the pilots let us on board for a look around.
I miss my silver BMX Ultra. Loved that bike. My best friend lived on a farm, and we’d create our own dirttracks there, with spectacular jumps. Then we measured who could jump the farthest.
I also learned to drive on that farm. At age 11, we were racing around the barns in an old NSU Prinz with a defective reverse gear. Which proved impractical that one day, when I lost control and crashed it into a meadow, situated 1.5 meters lower than the brick road around the barn. 
Candy bars only cost a nickel. For a dime you could get a Three Musketeers bar the size of a twin bed – or so it seemed to me at the time. Comic books for just a dime. A vacant lot could, in the course of an afternoon, be a cattle ranch in the Old West, a construction site, a battlefield in a safely distant war, the surface of the planet Mars, or an unexplored jungle, filled with savage animals and hostile natives. Mom making fresh bread for us every week when we lived in the mountains.
I remember one time I brought a friend over and my mom sat us on the back porch and handed us a basket of strawberries and (trumpet fanfare) the SUGAR BOWL!!! We held onto the strawberries by the stem and dipped them in sugar. Man, that was the best after-school treat ever. My friend was impressed (and he came from a monied family, which mine was definitely not).
There is so little spontaneous mirth in the adult world. I wonder what life would be like if society recognized how valuable these moments were. Wouldn’t it be nice to have “recess” at work? “Okay everybody, out on the playground!” Okay, so I’m past the “hanging-on-the-monkeybars-by-my-knees” stage, but sometimes I think there’s a conspiracy to drive us to an early grave by “seriousing” us to death.
–SSgtBaloo
The sense that life consisted mainly of long, seemingly almost infinite times of play and doing stuff you wanted to do, puncuated by brief, finite periods of work and doing stuff you didn’t want to do. As opposed to adult life, where it’s the other way around.
I don’t really know what to say. I just want to thank you all for being so honest in your sharing. Some of your posts have brought tears to my eyes AND made me laugh out loud.
I think SSgt Baloo has a great point. Maybe we can use some of these thouhts to inspire us to be more playful during the day. Stop worrying so much, and just enjoy the little things again. I know for sure that reading many of the responses made me want to take my own children out and do as many things with them as I could think of.
Keep the great memories coming!
moejuck
I miss my mom.
I miss not being afraid.
I can remember spending summers on the back of my bike. 90% of the time I had scrapped knees, tender palms or other signs of crashing on my bike. I’d do jumps and speed with my bike as a kid, so that it was a wonder I didn’t kill myself.
I can remember speeding down the street on the skateboard (barefoot) 90 to nothing, just to feel the wind in my hair. And the end of the street was a ditch, which we’d come barreling at on the skateboard, then jump off once the skateboard hit the grass, and across the ditch on the pile of dirt–full speed.
I remember climbing trees so high that the branches would snap under our weight–but that was okay, 'cause the frame of mind was that you’d catch the thicker branches on your way down.
I remember skating around the roller rink, so fast I’d be dizzy, and all the times while I was learning to turn (crossing one foot over the other), and I would keep falling–SMACK! onto the polished wood of the rink floor. Up I’d go, and try it again.
Now, when I get on a bike, I’m worried that if the bike hits a rut in the path, it’ll bend the wheel, or I’ll fall over and scrape my palms/knees on the ground and rip my pants, etc. A skateboard now? Ha, forget that. It’s a supicious looking piece of wood on four tiny wheels, for crying out loud. Might as well strap banana skins to my feet. Climbing trees brings to mind of falling out of trees, which bring to my mind terrified phone calls to 911, and ambulance rides with me strapped in a neck brace. Roller skating is just a real absolute for breaking a wrist, which means I couldn’t drive, or take a shower (without a plastic bag taped to my arm), or blow dry my hair… Although none of this stuff has ever happened to me (and the only time I’ve broken a bone is when I was 9 and flipped over the handle bars of my bike trying to do a stunt and fell on my face and broke my nose), I’m terrified of getting hurt. Of course, I am a klutz, and trip up stairs (and recently pulled a tendon in my shoulder falling down the stairs on my birthday–no, I wasn’t drunk).
I’d just like to do some of the stuff I did as a kid, and not even think of what COULD happen.
I miss not having a period.
It was sooo nice not to.
I miss playing doctor with my neighbor, Patti Ellis.
Sure would like to do that now!
I miss being genuinely ecstatic about mail with my name on it. Now it’s just bills, bills, bills.
I miss writing and receiving letters.