I love my life.  I’m happier now than I’ve ever been.  However it seems that late at night I become reflective.  Contemplative.  Many times I go back through my short life and look at how much has changed even in my brief tenure on this globe.  There are some things I miss, that while even though for most of them I don’t feel the lack most days I still feel even so that something wonderful has passed, never to be seen again in this lifetime.

Without further adieu, these are some things I miss:

-I miss when I could just hop in my car and go for a drive.  The double whammy of high gas prices and unemployment have limited my driving to only that which is necessary. At least it’s good for my carbon footprint.

-I miss living without a care.  I miss when the greatest problem I faced was beating the level I was on before mom called me to the dinner table, or whether I would get that game I was dying to play or that cool new Nerf gun for Christmas.

-I miss my grandpa, who passed last year.  I was never really close to him, and I do regret that to some extent although I don’t beat myself up over it.  Past is past after all.  He was a steady, laid back guy who was always ready to crack a joke.  His passing was like the collapse of an old but distinguished building: an inevitable thing but sad nevertheless.  He will be missed.

-I miss how my grandma used to be.  My other grandma, the one on my mom’s side.  She used to be a vivacious and energetic person until the cancer, but now that it’s gone she is very sickly and whiles away most days sitting in her chair and watching TV.  It’s sad to see such a bright light dimmed so much.

-I miss Saturday mornings.  Now that I’m unemployed of course I get Saturday’s off, but the magic that was Saturday as a kid is gone.  I watched cartoons when I was really young, and as I got older started watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Sci-Fi (I refuse to acknowledge the new spelling.)  Now?  It’s simply another day.

- I miss the old cartoons.  Hey Arnold, Doug, and all of the others I watched.  I know I can find them online but in some ways it isn’t the same really.  But then it never will be: that’s the nature of things.

-I miss that sense of wonder.  Although I do still have it, and it’s grown into a deeper and satisfying sense of awe and gratitude.  But I will never have that wide eyed child like wonder I had as a kid again.

-I miss my old congregation.  They’re still around for the most part of course.  And I couldn’t go back because my views have changed so radically, divorced so much from the Church’s teachings, that I would probably leave the building in a huff a minute after the sermon started.  Even so, for a long while there they were my Church family and you can’t help but miss something like that, even if you know now it wasn’t exactly healthy for you.

-I miss school boy crushes.  You know, when you would get butterflies and moon over a person?  Like back in high school and middle school and that one cutie was who you just KNEW you’d settle down with?  Of course for me it never worked out, but damn it all there is never a feeling like those first crushes you get.  I miss that naive and senseless joy, the purity of it untarnished by cynicism (which would grow as a result of said feelings actually) and bitterness.  Back when it wasn’t stupid to believe in fairy tales (well it was, just you didn’t know it) and you could simply enjoy the feeling.

-I miss high school.  But at the same time I don’t.  I love to wax nostalgic about the good ole days, but in all reality I was a miserable person back then.  Still, memory is selective and I often reflect on the good times and good people.  Sometimes I even want to go back.  But then I come to my senses and realize some things are better left to year books and memory.

-I miss the time when the world didn’t seem so crazy, when it didn’t seem like every day there was some new thing trying to kill me or destroy my rights.  Of course I was also blissfully ignorant when I was younger so that helped.

-I miss my best friend, who lives far away.  I don’t get to see her often.

-I miss summers, when for three glorious months you were free to do as you pleased!

-I miss Christmas.  It isn’t that I don’t celebrate it anymore.  It’s that I don’t like it.  I used to love the lights and the whole atmosphere, but now it just seems like a burden.

-I miss going for family drives to look at Christmas lights.  We’d always vote which display was the best.  We’d usually take the same route every year, wending through all the local towns on cold winter’s nights in search of the best displays.

-I miss my old college.  I liked the Kent campus I went to better than Muskingum.  I know more people up that way, and I have family up there.  I felt more at home.

-I miss how my group of friends used to be.  The dynamics have changed a lot.  I wish some of the things that happened, hadn’t.  But that’s life: dynamic and unpredictable.

-I miss stupid, hopeful optimism.  Not that I’m not optimistic.  It’s just tempered by realism.

-I miss Hills.  Yeah it’s a stupid department store.  But man I loved that place when I was little!

-I miss those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books.  Dad still has a bunch of them, but at some point growing up I realized they were lame, and a little part of my childhood died I think.

-I miss building with Legos.  I used to do that all the time…I was either doing that or playing Nintendo most days (I was a nerd so sue me.)  We used to build forts and mechs, and then shoot them up with catapults my dad built us out of wood.  It was a grand old time!

…and I can’t think of anymore.  I don’t want to give anyone the wrong impression here.  I’m not depressed.  I just happened to be stumbling and come across a picture that for whatever reason gave me the urge to go out and go for a night drive (something else I miss as I have more and more trouble seeing at night.)  Then I realized that the price of gas being what it is that would be pretty stupid.  So I decided to make a list about better (?) times.

There is a lesson to be learned from this little ramble though.  I am not sad these things are no more.  I mean yes part of me is sad, especially when it concerns my grandparents or friends I’ve since parted with.  But in another sense reflecting back fills me with gratitude.  Because I got to experience these wonderful things.  Because all these things though they may be gone now, helped to bring me one way or another to this every moment.  They helped bring me to sit in this chair and speak to you, dear reader, in this silly little blog of mine.

Ever heard the phrase “my entire life lead me to this moment?”  Dear reader that is every moment!  All the hurts, the joys, the triumphs, and the tribulations.  All the small and great things in our lives.  All of them lead to this moment, the only moment we have.

So no don’t think me depressed.  I am grateful.  While I miss these things and probably always will, at the same time my life is full.  Their time has passed, but the memory remains :)