One’s seventies are the decade for self-assessment – if you can stand it -- if you get that far.

I’ve gotten that far. Today (audible gasp) is my seventy-third birthday. No felicitations, please – or condolences, even a mortified emoji. My innards are a tangle – I don’t know what I think – or if I want to know. Only, in my line of work, I’ve no choice. As a writer – about myself – self-assessment is do or die.

One’s externals are simple enough to audit. Did I leave my world improved? Was I prosperous, prudent? How intensely will I be missed? How did I cope with the curveballs and screwballs life inevitably hurls? (A friend asked why I don’t cite sports more often.)

Before the bar of public opinion, we tend to present our best case, extolling or exonerating where we can. Who’s to defend us if not ourselves?

Our private self, if it insists, is a sterner judge. How did I do really, we may find ourselves asking in the horrifying hollow of night? How, all things considered? How, compared to my dreams? How might I yet remediate, so near my finish line? (Sports again.)

Any final verdict, if we reach one, we may opt to keep sealed. My take on me, we huff, is nobody’s business but my own! Why invite accusations – or weepy pleadings? Let bygones be bygones.

Self-portraitists are denied the luxury of inattention. Either you discern yourself candidly – or you flunk. Rembrandt, in the visual arts, never failed to face his face – and he had plenty to regret. The heroism of his self-awareness makes us shudder with awe.

Fear not, I won’t burden you with what I think of me, as if you were a bartender and I a sloppy drunk. Partly that’s courtesy and partly I don’t know yet. No less than the future, the past is infinite. The more I rummage in my attic, the more I happen on, creditable and otherwise.

My words, though, are changeless: I wrote what I wrote. Anything unpublished I might deep-six, only that feels cowardly, messing with the evidence. Jane and I have watched enough detective shows to know coverups never succeed.

It’s a funny feeling facing one’s former face. Crummy pages, which abound, I can forgive as apprentice work. Even Mozart and Keats were learners once.

It’s the good stuff that perplexes. Yes, good – good enough to make me blink, incredulous: “I made that? Well, I’ll be!” Is this vanity, I can’t help wondering, patting myself on the back? But no. My approval’s hardly indiscriminate. Much, maybe most, of my remains are cringeworthy. But some not. Even forty years later, I read it pleased.

Now I blush. The nerve of me, blowing my own horn, even unwitnessed. Where’s that humility, in which I take such conspicuous pride? Maybe – self-defensively – I’m overpraising, to make myself feel better. Your best wasn’t that good, Carll – gimme a break!

As grizzled Forty-Niners panned interminable trickles for a glint of gold, so I in my archive. I almost wish I had erased my past it weighs so heavily as time ticks down. Maybe I should set an accidental fire of my yellowing journals: oops, sorry, free at last.

No such luck. We cannot evade who we’ve been without self-incrimination. Bur in fairness, we should forgive, even applaud ourselves, where it’s merited. No, I was no Rembrandt – or Keats – or Mozart – but hey, sometimes I got things right. Whaddayaknow!

My grade school report cards awarded me A’s for achievement and F’s for effort. Effort grades, I sniffed, were for losers. I feel differently now.