The Cariboo Cafe

     The Cariboo Cafe

-- Helena Viramontes

But God is just a man, and His mistakes can be undone

             Viramonte's Cariboo Cafe illustrated a lot of jumping around in her mini chapters throughout her short story. I found myself unable to keep up with what was happening, getting confused by the vague way she would start each new section, seeming as though she were changing speakers on me.  I would often have to go back and re read what I read because I was unsure of where these new characters were introduced.  I felt myself doubting a lot of what was going on because of the jumping around.  And then I stopped for a second to reflect on this.  Was it purposeful?  Was the confusion made as a point in the perspective of the quote above? 

             I feel as though in life itself, when something goes wrong we initially will stop in that moment and retrace our steps as to how we got here trying to figure out why we made the choices we did to end up here.  The quote above, "But God is just a man, and His mistakes can be undone"(Viramontes 76) is an interesting way to explain the unexplained.  I looked at this as a blame for what had happened to the mother and her son Geraldo.  She thinks that someone of higher power is responsible for having things end up the way that they did and thus does what she can to get out of "the path" that He had made for her because she fears that it was a mistake.  But was it?  When we go back and try to retrace our steps, and in this case re reading to better understand, we cannot change anything.  It is what it is.  What has happened already happened.  What is being thought has already be thought.  These people after Geraldo will not magically stop thinking the things that they think or coming after him because their purpose of going after him has deceased.  Whatever is going to happen is bound to happen.  And that is where I tied in the quote, my own confusion in the story of having tried to follow along and the author's (possibly purposeful?) way of jumping around from scene to scene, speaker to speaker.  Because at one point the speaker is the Sister, then the Mom, then the cook and there is no concrete way of knowing that this is them, we kind of get clued in by dropped hints from the author by the way they're talking and the way that they're reacting/doing things.  So, does God make mistakes?  Or are these yours in which you don't want to admit?  And if you do admit that they are yours, why did you state the first comment on God to begin with?  What's been done can't be undone.  I think that is the strange reality behind the purpose of this story.  What will be will be.