My Latest (Last?) Column
Edith Cook
Miss Edith
(Dr. Edith Cook)
Published February 19, 2025. Editor’s Headline: https://www.thecheyennepost.com/opinion/columnists/you-cant-always-get-what-you-want/article_3bad6820-eedb-11ef-a462-6385b4223508.html
“We always want what we can’t have,” said the man I loved thirty years ago in California. It was his academic way of letting me down; he was, after all, a professor of French who taught (in English) a seminar on Critical Theory that a group of German-American students attended, myself included. The seminar focused on the French thinker Michel Foucault and his confreres. Since our three children had left the nest, I was enrolled in a Master’s program in English and German.
After attaining my degree, I moved to another state and a doctoral program. One time, when I checked the internet about the professor of French, I learned that he died at 57 of cancer and that, when he was but a few days old, his parents fled France as the Nazis advanced on Paris in 1940. Poor baby, my poor darling, I whispered at the news. He’d never acknowledged being Jewish.
Then my cousin from Germany visited, singing a song I vaguely remembered from childhood: A boy pleads with his mother to award him a horse; even “a small horse” would be paradise, he says in the song. When he finds a rocking horse under the Christmas tree, he says, “Dearest Mama, that’s not the horse I wanted.” Another time he receives a horse made of chocolate, yet another time a book of horse stories. Every time his response is the same: “It’s not the horse I wanted.”
The little boy is an adult when two horses, pulling a hearse, stop at their house. For the last time he says, “Dearest Mama, that’s not the horses I wanted.”
The song characterizes my French professor’s edict that humans are destined to yearn for the impossible. If true, such a focus brings a lifetime of misery. Does it have to be this way?
When I was in my teens, my homelife was chaos, and I ardently wished to be someplace else. Hence, when Mother died of cancer as I turned eighteen, I served notice on my dad that I intended to leave my position in the family business (a grocery store and bakery). My brother Karl, two years younger than I, who worked with Father in our bakery, did the same.
A year later, Father found a tenant for our business. Not knowing a soul in the Big Apple, and with only the sparsest of English knowledge, Karl left for New York. I moved to Paris, France, where I worked as au pair. Two years later, I immigrated to California and married a missile engineer studying law at night. I gave birth to our children, and helped my husband through law school. After he passed the bar exam, I helped him start his law office. Before long, Karl moved to California to be near us.
My brother and I had turned yearning into action. The cost was high—having to adjust to another country and its different ways of speaking and living—but we were desperate.
When Karl moved to California, our two young brothers, left behind in Father’s care in Germany, did not fare well. Karl died young, but our brothers died even earlier. Helmut, the nxt to youngest, had joined my nascent California family art fourteen. For him, the US experiment ended badly as he turned thirty-one. At Karl’s death at forty-five, the last of my brothers left standing, I felt bereft and alone. The absence of the siblings I’d cared for since childhood seemed like a warped widowhood.
Since then I’ve learned not to pine for what’s irreparably lost. At my husband’s death in 2003, I resigned myself to a solo existence. We had divorced a few years earlier, but found ways to help each other now and then. My adult children and their families lived in three different states; their dad had died in 2003. Relying on my own resources turned less arduous as the years went by. I made mistakes, to be sure. A couple of times one or the other of my adult children helped get me out of a tight spot. I learned not to repeat my errors.
Do we always want what we can’t have? It surprises me that, at past eighty, I attained the love I no longer coveted, the love my French professor was unable or unwilling to offer. The experience is so novel, I still can’t believe my good fortune. That love arrived late in life, without my clamoring for it, is as remarkable as it is new.
Even more startling is that my sweetie feels the same way. “I never thought I would love again,” he said, reminiscing on the almost sixty years he celebrated with his late spouse.
Life’s mystery is something we glimpse only in spurts and starts. If we take it as it comes, with its setbacks, tragedies, and occasional rewards, we may consider ourselves blessed. Age has little to do with it, yet age can bring a laid-back approach to the vagaries of life. If we can keep from from demanding the unattainable, life may get easier as time goes on.
Jill or James Peebles
Miss Edith
www.edithcook.com
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Nancy Ford
Sent: Tuesday, February 25, 2025 3:32 PM
To: edith...@googlegroups.com <edith...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [edith-cook] My Latest (Last?) Column
Cynthia Bloomquist
Geri Doherty
Carol Sowards
dwb...@vcn.com
Thanks Edith, sad for your brothers, but an interesting story. My mother who will be 100 in Sept, lost dad in 1988. We always encouraged her to be open to someone new, but she always said she had no interest. And, she was true to her word as she did have opportunities. I have often thought of how lonely she must be, but she never let on until her last five years or so. She has outlived all of her friends and siblings. I have two brothers still living, but they are in California or Cheyenne and unable to travel. So, I am the poor substitute. She still lives alone in Chugwater…thank the Lord that she is able. I am glad it has worked out for you! If the paper closes, so be it….you can take a break and have company to do so with. Dennis Baker
From: edith...@googlegroups.com <edith...@googlegroups.com> On Behalf Of Carol Sowards
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2025 5:33 PM
To: edith...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [edith-cook] My Latest (Last?) Column
Dear Edith,
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