Catch the Moon

Both “Catch the Moon” by Judith Ortiz Cofer and “The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant” by W.D. Wetherell are short stories with similar ideas and themes. Although the characters and plots differ slightly, the central themes are very similar. In “Catch the Moon”, the love of the main characters mother continues to strengthen him even after her death. In “The Bass, the River, and Sheila Mant”, the narrators love for fishing continues to give him strength after he loses the girl he thought he loved. In both short stories, love gives the main character strength.
In Cofer’s “Catch the Moon”, a teenage boy, Luis, who had been running with the entirely wrong crowd is let out of a juvenile hall on the simulation that he will labor for his father at his junkyard for the remaining six months of his original sentence. Luis began making bad choices after his mother died three years before. Once his mother died he began to not get along with his father even though his father gave him a job at his junkyard. He does not appreciate his father’s junkyard business and considers him pathetic because he won’t let go of anything that pertains to his wife that passed away. Luis’s situation remains unchanged until he meets Naomi, a stunning young woman who needs Luis’s help finding the right hubcap for her Volkswagen. Unknown to Luis, Naomi’s family owns the funeral home where his mother’s funeral was held. This, along with Naomi’s wholesomeness, brings back Luis’s memories of his mother, because she always told him how proud she was of him, even when Luis did nothing. His mother’s words of kindness and encouragement cause Luis to have a revelation; he breaks down and begins to see things in an entirely different way. Luis drives to the junkyard late one night, climbs up on his mountain of hubcaps, and, “by lamppost light”, begins what he refers to as the “treasure hunt” for the “moon-shaped wheel cover” for Naomi’s car. He “sorted the wheel covers by make, size, and condition, stopping