proximoception

This reminds me of a time when I was about eight years old, and went off to summer camp for the first time. An hour after the bus stopped in the parking lot and let us out, I set my canvas bag down on the cot and found my lunch somewhere under the piles of knickknacks, folded clothes, etc. The sandwich was crushed, and half the juice had leaked out, seeping into the shirts and staining part of the canvas outer lining. And there was that heart-sinking feeling coincident with the realization that I couldn't call them about it. What came up from "the bottom of the pot," instead, was a kind of lonely gratitude that he or she would probably have called homesickness. Though it wasn't that, because the breach from home was just one of the necessary conditions for feeling thankful. (A gratitude or maybe a love like that "sharp pain stabbed in the depths of the mind," as Homer says when Jove recognizes Ate.) Thankful, and happy too -- because that was the first time I remember seeing a kind of wasteful abundance in the things outside me.