In “Oranges,” Gary Soto celebrates the love and affection a twelve-year-old boy had for his girlfriend during the winter season. The first line of the poem makes it clear that the boy was only twelve years old when he was first able to walk down the street with a girl. The poem illustrates the nervousness shown as they walked down the street "cold and heavy with two oranges in his jacket" and describes how the boy was nervous. As being nervous would make you notice every little thing happening around you and notice even the smallest things. Like a typical twelve-year-old boy, he didn't know what to expect from his first date with his girlfriend. Oranges are his burning love, his desire, hence the "fire in my hands" or "the porch... yellow". The orange in his jacket symbolized the bright, loving relationship between the boy and the girl, as the orange could attract a lot of attention "it was so bright against... that, from a distance/someone might think I was lighting a fire" in my hands". Even though it's winter and everything around them is cold and boring, the love between these teenagers still manages to shine in the darkness. The “Orange” is a symbolism of great happiness and being able to describe where the girl lives, it is vivid that they have known each other for a while. When the boy and the girl walked down the street and entered a drug store, he took a candy bar but the boy only had a token with him while the candy bar cost 10 cents. This situation shows that this period was a time when candy bars cost 10 cents and a time when a store owner accepted an orange from a boy to make full payment for what he brought because the boy had no the entire payment. ..... middle of paper ...... grandmother's corpse and grandson went from playing everyone's "favorite tune" to playing a hymn that suited the situation. However, there are two phases in their action; in Western culture, the behavior that the family takes towards the corpse at first is a casual attitude as they should have been sober and dejected and instead they ignore and forget the fact that the grandmother is dead, which could be due to the fact who never liked her, as our narrator says in the last line “Grandmother, dead, who never liked me”. The second phase is African culture; in Africa, when an elderly person in a family dies, it is seen as a cause for celebration and where people enjoy themselves and dine together. So, judging from the African perspective, the family's attitude in the beginning was absolutely right and they could have dined and won all day. Works cited