Kamisaka Sekka
Lion dancer
(1920s)

"…an inevitable side effect of switching out former Prosperities for some cranky new fresh ones, of WrestlingAngels."

Fresh Prosperities do not necessarily quietly surrender themselves into existence. The process more closely resembles WrestlingAngels, for while they might eventually surrender, they rarely do so quietly. Fresh Prosperities might be said to be inherently noisy, fussy, as if equal parts impatient and impertinent, aching more to be conquered than accepted. Perhaps they are chartered under a variant of the No Free Lunches Rule, which seems to insist upon satisfying some twisted notion of worthiness before acquiescing into any acceptances. Those who insist that they somehow deserve any Prosperity seem ready and waiting for some form of rude awakening, for, like angels themselves, Prosperities are nobody’s pushovers, and might well insist upon disturbing conditions, not the least of which includes accepting the budding realization that Prosperities get to choose who wins and who loses them. Since not a single beneficiary in the history of this universe so far, ever once deserved their eventual Prosperity, every angel’s insistence upon deciding for can prove to feel at least alarming, often worse.

When The Muse managed to break both ankles in one literal fell swoop, the resulting BreakPoint left a formerly stable Prosperity gasping. We had just a couple of days previous congratulated each other on our good health, reveling in how we’d somehow managed to avoid surgeries and joint replacements, unlike many if not most of our contemporaries. We knew somehow that we were living on borrowed time, just as if anyone could ever not be living on borrowed time, but we still felt fortunate. Perhaps we’d just not needed to start repaying that inevitable debt yet and therefore thought ourselves somehow more Prosperous than our brethren. Vanity occasionally accompanies everyone’s passage.

Her fall had brought a fresh reality into focus. Self-determination, that constant companion of every more mature Prosperity, was immediately relegated to the way back seat, along with a curiously reassuring sense that we would certainly be bestowed with another quick recovery. I woke early and drove the three hours across the Hanford Reservation on a remarkably smoky morning. Visibility was well under two miles and a hazy orange glow backlit what countryside I could still see. I navigated by Dred Reckoning, uncertain what the day might hold in trust for us. The BreakPoint had shattered expectations without offering much in the way of clear replacements, and I still considered myself at least a minor master of The Muse and my immediate universe. The questions outnumbered credible answers, though. Should she just go back home to undergo the surgeries the ER doctors hinted at as probably necessary? If so, how might she be transported since she wasn’t then conventionally transportable?

The hospital was staffed with professional angels, though most declined the description since they more or less continually engaged in such considerations. The first angel tried to dissuade us from returning home for the surgery, insisting that insurance companies wouldn’t agree to pay for any two-thousand-dollar ambulance rides, and admitting that The Muse could not survive a three-hour ride sitting up in a car. Where would she go upon returning, anyway? A physician friend advised that she could simply report to the local ER upon arrival and end up admitted to the hometown hospital. She even vouched for a trusted local orthopedic surgeon. The Muse had opened up a channel with her hometown doctor, hoping for a referral and a tangible invitation into a specific program upon her return, for the problem was not merely transport but also delivery address. I called the local who had sponsored the bus tour that ended with The Muse falling, and sought his intervention. How might we transport her home? He said he’d get right on that and get back to me.

He got right back to me in the form of an offer to fit his wife’s Soccer Mom Van with pillows and have her, another angel, drive The Muse back home. I contacted the hospital’s Occupational Therapy department, asking for advice and counsel on whether such a scheme might succeed. They were at lunch when I called. The next few hours were flooded with inquiries and Angels, each seemingly echoing off each other as if operating in a deeply resonating tunnel. The signal-to-noise ratio often exceeded the humanly tolerable, and our frustration grew, for we knew, if not precisely for certain, how we might resolve this situation: The Muse would go home, have her surgery and begin her recovery there, seemingly come Hell or even unlikely-in-this-drought-year high water. Our expectations and efforts were successfully stymied through that long afternoon, though, since Angels refuse to dance to any visiting callers’ instructions. They had notions of their own and insisted upon acceptance: WrestlingAngels, defiantly withstanding.

Rules exist designed to dissuade hospitals from agreeing to release a patient to receive a parallel treatment elsewhere. This seems frivolous to regulating authorities no less than to insurance companies. The Muse’s hometown doctor found it impossible to preschedule her into any local orthopedic regimen in her absence, and advised that she acquiesce to receiving the surgery remotely and return home for recovery. The preponderance of evidence, not in any way obvious earlier that morning, became unavoidable by late afternoon, after a hot half dozen WrestlingAngels had finished their matches and each, unsurprisingly in retrospect, came out the winners. A fresh set of recently unwanted Prosperities had colonized The Muse and my present and near future. I would be spending the night as a guest of the Soccer Mom Van driver and her husband, warmly welcomed by those unsuspecting angels.

I left The Muse uneasily anticipating the most significant surgery she’d ever faced to drive to our benefactor’s place in the gathering smoky twilight. A red half moon hovered over the scene as I failed to calculate the likelihood that precisely this fresh reality could have ever actually come into existence. I blame it on that BreakPoint, that unwanted intrusion into our over-mature Prosperities, so mature, frankly, that they had sometimes seemed to border on boring. We will face no such impediments to progress in our foreseeable future, which has suddenly and, upon reflection, gratefully, become a whole lot less foreseeable, an inevitable side effect of switching out former Prosperities for some cranky new fresh ones, of WrestlingAngels.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz