Utagawa Hiroshige 歌川 広重
Small View of Yedo
(1817–58)

"…the very definition of success, and therefore curiously eternal."

I am fondly recalling a Prosperity I never really knew on the occasion of the eve of my seventy-fifth birthday. I have no clue how I managed to survive to such an overripe age, other than to echo that ancient advice that insisted the only way to actually achieve anything must inevitably be one day at a time. My life, then, might only be properly characterized as a series of days, no two all that different, until, over time, great differences emerged. I experienced very few catastrophies, which might be the primary reason I can still sit here fondly recollecting. Even my most wanting periods seem downright prosperous in some senses. When I was foraging for sustenance, I still had my youth, an often underappreciated form of Prosperity that everybody’s certain to lose. As I’ve aged, I have retained many memories, another form that Prosperity assumes, as tangible as air, if not more so some days.

I was born into a world that no longer exists. Oh, the place names remain essentially intact, but the Prosperities each contained were seeping out and away then, and many have simply ceased to exist, even in history books. North Central Oregon, circa August, 1951, had already peaked Prosperity-wise; decades of consolidation had left the wheatland with a handful of families. Automation was slowly replacing the need for virtual armies of harvesters to invade the place every August. What had built up to become a tiny city was already retracting into the unpromising hardpan of its native high desert steppeland. My birth family was aging. My maternal grandmother had died three years before. My maternal grandfather, unaccustomed to his role as a widower, lost his mind with grief and loneliness, even though his youngest daughter and her able husband had refurbished that shack next door and moved in their growing family. On August 19, 1951, Bonnie Marie (nee) Wallace gave birth to me on the country doctor’s kitchen table, the closest thing to an operating table in that county. My mother’s family gathered close around her, for she still had a legion of great aunts and an uncle or two who hovered over her like hens.

Most if not all of her surviving family had been born before the turn of the prior century. My maternal grandfather was less than fifty-five years old. My folks were in their twenties with no clear idea from where their future Prosperities might emerge, yet they went right ahead and started having kids. Their confidence was a Prosperity that seems to have waned in the intervening years, though our future holds not an ounce less certainty than it ever once did then. That confidence might be another of those faith-based thingamabobs, since, regardless of the sophistication of our forecasting tools, we never seem to achieve much certainty. My scientist friends explain this as an explosion of variance. It explains why plans must turn out differently than expected, especially if such differences are scrupulously anticipated. If Prosperity relies on our possessing certainty, the one thing I can confidently say must be that we’re all screwed, though we might just be screwed anyway.

Hardly a shred of the world I entered when I was born remains. Sure, this house The Muse and I inhabit was around then, but it was so different as to hardly bear resemblance to what it’s become since. It features inside toilets now and that new-fangled electricity, an anomaly when it was built. The people are essentially all gone now, for even those who were kids then are nearly eighty. The newly-marrieds would have been over a hundred had they lived. None of them lived because none of them ever had. Within a year of my birth, my birth family moved away from there to this valley I imprinted on so thoroughly that I consider this to be the center of my universe, though I’m not a native. That world, too, that seemed promising enough to attract my parents so long ago, hardly resembles the place they entered, and everyone who greeted them here now resides in the Mt View Cemetery, their former Prosperity evident by their headstone placement.

I have no complaints. My annual physical exam, conducted yesterday, found me still surprisingly sound of mind and body. My son and his kids are visiting, and I know the role I must play in their presence. It’s the role I saw my own grandfather play when I was their age. I represent the pinnacle of a disappearing Prosperity that will most certainly be gone by the time they achieve my age. They are present to witness the waning status quo so that they might inhabit its inevitable replacement. I pray that one day their Prosperity, which will most certainly be one utterly alien to me, will allow them time to reflect on ProsperityPasting, its inevitable denouement, and perhaps its one true purpose. May it stand as a testament to those of its time, like gravestones, dignifying what might otherwise seem a failure. Nothing inevitable can ever be properly characterized as failing, for achieving what was never any more than inevitable must be the very definition of success, and therefore curiously eternal.

©2026 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Prosperity, #PureSchmaltz