I’m reading words written decades ago and really liking them. The thoughts feel fresh, the style ingratiating and distinct, I’m greedy for the next page. How come I didn’t know about this guy? I want to crow my discovery from the rooftop like chanticleer. Hey, friend, let me introduce you. I’m betting you two will get along like a house afire!

                  The author, alas, is me.

                  I say alas because only appalling vanity applauds its own productions. I remember with a shudder the novelist John O’Hara’s epitaph in the Princeton (NJ) Cemetery:

Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time, the first half of the twentieth century. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well.

Encountering these, a lonely traveler feeling for my place in America, I gulped. Shakespeare got away with predicting his duration but what a risk! “Better than anyone else”? Who reads O’Hara now? Such immodesty boomerangs to the boaster. Inadvertently, John O’Hara indicted himself. How sad.

                  My eyes had not met these words for twenty years. After tidying them to my satisfaction, I’d laid them tenderly in a file, to await their resurrection. I’d written to write, not publish. I knew no publisher would give them a second look. They were no more money-makers than Thoreau’s words or Emily Dickinson’s. I’d resigned myself to their obscurity. After tucking them in, I was shy about revisiting them. I preferred to remember them as golden. Why rob myself of such a pleasant dream?

                  But now it was time to wake them. If I liked them, I could share them with a growing sodality of readers who liked what I liked. Technology enabled me to do this inexpensively without any publisher’s say-so. I hesitated for weeks before retrieving the file. I wondered if Emily Dickinson felt this way about the trunk which contained her thousand-plus never-to-be-published poems?

                  I printed the pages and propped them on a shelf the way one might a college acceptance letter. I wanted to know and didn’t. Hope and dread ran high. Then one day, what the hell, why was I being such a wimp! I began. Not half bad. The pages turned on their own. I dimly remember making these words but wow, they were better than I recalled. I’d rate them fine if anyone else had made them. But self-praise would be both implausible and cringeworthy. Remember John O’Hara!

                  I blushed like a schoolboy after his first kiss. Now what?

                  I have never thought well of myself. My parents weren’t impressed either. I find praise incredible. I still can’t get over Jane’s marrying me. She was smart. What was she thinking?

                  I write my best the way I used to play tennis, grinning at an occasional stroke but never dreaming of glory. I might win a club championship but beyond that not a chance. This prose was – fasten your seatbelt – as vivid, vigorous, and virile as the prose I prized. That couldn’t be true. I read it again. I blinked. I made that?

                  Maybe my judgment was defective in self-defense. Maybe my ego couldn’t handle a candid appraisal. But no. My verdicts have ballast after half a century. I wasn’t cutting myself slack. When I’m bored, I’m bored. And I wasn’t.

                  It’s comic, this pas de deux for one. Not narcissistic: this reader hardly recalls the author. Not gloating. Glad, rather. I made something new and good. Maybe, just maybe, I will not have lived in vain.

                  Go, me.