I can remember driving...

I can remember driving with my late father through western Pennsylvania. He was struck by the amount of land without a human figure in it. So much space! After long silence, in a traveler's trance resembling the chessboard trance, he said, "Ah, how many Jews might have been settled here! Room enough for everybody.
At times I feel like a socket that remembers its tooth.

-- "The Bellarosa Connection" (1990), Saul Bellow