Our cultural concept of life and how we perceive life around us makes something American. To be American is to be openly expressive, appreciative of life and the importance of each life, individualistic, diverse, vivacious, balanced, egotistic, and most important of all ever-changing - just like Georgia O’Keefe’s paintings.

This story should have just been called "The Misfit". It's a really dark, disturbing, sad story all around, the grandmother is well meaning in her manipulation but I got the sense that the entire story is really about one bad incident leading to an even worse incident.

I find ekphrasis quite interesting and would like to write about that for this essay. I am however having a hard time finding poems inspired by Georgia O'Keefe's artwork. I think she is a great example of what I think is American art, if anyone happens to find any poems inspired by Georgia's paintings, please pass them along.

Excerpt from wikipedia about Ekphrasis:

I think the meaning of this poem is pretty obvious, it's a doctor writing about his patient for whom he has come to care and feel fond of. I wondered though if there could be more to it, so I searched the web a little and found the author's page:

http://litmed.med.nyu.edu/poems/the.distant.moon.rc.html - the author speaks of why he wrote the poem and what it means to him.

At first, reading through this story, I thought it was just another tale of boy sees girl -> boy becomes infatuated -> boy does something stupid but girl doesn't even notice it... Thinking about it later on though, I realized there was more to it than that. It's about a checkout guy at the A&P, who has no power over how the store is run, taking a stand against his all-powerful manager for what he believes in, only to be disappointed when the girls he is standing up for [probably too engrossed in their own world] fail to notice his gesture.

I really like how this poem was framed, to me, when I read it, it wasn't just about getting old and becoming forgetful or even forgeting specific details.