Wednesday, 31 August, 2022 – It rained all day today in Newquay, I am pretty sure. We did not talk or text, so I am taking a guess that Elias, Ian, and Kelsey had a quiet day, inside somewhere.
Or, it didn’t rain all day and they ventured forth to the beach. Cold as it probably was, I can imagine Elias saying he had planned to go to the beach and damnit, he was going to go. I googled “surfing in Newquay” and the map showed as many surf shops in one small area as I ever saw in Hawai’i.
Elias said he thought it was a sort of surf town, and we laughed about it, but it seems like it is a thing. For real.
When I talked to Elias yesterday, at night his time, he had just finished re-reading The Color Purple by Alice Walker. He took a few books with him, small paperbacks, so he would have something to read if he did not have internet or did not want to be on his phone. He first read The Color Purple for his senior English paper, comparing it to Woman at Point Zero. I remember this paper clearly because he asked me to just proof it for typos but I wanted to read what he was reading. So, I read Woman at Point Zero. It is mercifully short but excruciatingly grim. And I re-read The Color Purple, which I remember thinking in April, 2018, this is an amazing book. I love this book.
I have only read his senior paper and not talked to Elias about his thoughts on The Color Purple. What I do know is that it has a lot to say about how women really want to be treated, seen, and loved. I guess I hope Elias sees that, too. Whatever he can make sense of, at 22. I am not sure what he makes of it, but I am glad he chose to take the book on his trip.
On the topic of reading, Elias said he had bought a book in Paris (I think) by Alice Waters, called My Pantry. I think he must be relaxing because he is taking time to read, for which I am very glad. I know my books don’t take the place of relationships with people; I don’t want my books to supplant people. Yet I have taken comfort in the companionship and refuge of my books, so many times, for so many years, I do feel a sort of relationship with books I read at a specific time and place. I was just thinking that whenever Elias sees The Color Purple on his bookshelf, or runs across it at a bookstore, or his daughter or son has to read it for class, images of details in the book will come back to him, vividly, and he’ll remember where he was in August, 2022, traveling in France and England with Ian and Kelsey. That’s what I hope for, anyway.