How important am I, really?

 

November 6, 1998

 

Either I don't get the idea of the power of the press, or other people don't, but coming back to Secaucus has left me with this odd sense of my own importance that I'm not completely comfortable with.

People clapping me on the back to tell me how good it is to have me back, as if before I left they never realized how important I was.

Nor did I.

It is hard not to get seduced by the overwhelming sense of ego that such a greeting brings. I went back to Bloomfield today and found the owner there, someone telling me how I am welcome back.

"Give Lucha a message," he told me. "Tell her that Free agents have a way of leaving their owners and that I can get you back someday."

All night election night, I heard about as much.

I guess no one knows their impact in anything until after they give it up, otherwise no one would be able to do anything but bask in their own glories.

The whole concept of power scares me, having an influence beyond myself. At one time, I likened myself to the Weatherman of the 1970s, someone who might lead a revolution of workers against their masters. I soon realized that leaders like me could afford to lose our jobs where as most of our followers cannot.

While I work hard at writing, I fear the pen that I wield and the concept that people take what I say too seriously. By rights, all I should be doing is making issues clear for people to judge for themselves.

Both told me yesterday how much Harmon Cove liked me and How thrilled they were when I came back. She said I had become some kind of standard bearer for them.

Are they crazy?

Here and in Glen Ridge, people exaggerate my worth, in both cases, my work appearing in a two-bit weekly not the New York Times, talking about what goes on in a small town, not the wide world. I have no special insight on truth, only a deadline to meet and a urgency to have something of worth under my name when it appears in print.

I do understand the power of word, of how a person can be preserved by the right kind of story, how an obit written in a daily or weekly often can be the only time a person's life gets summed up in print. I like the idea that I can help capture something of a person's life, giving them a sense of importance they might not otherwise have, but that is hardly the power these people think I have.

I like the idea that someday people might read my novels and find something great contained in them, a moment in time captured like an air bubble in a piece of quartz. But again, it is the work, not the man that is important, the product that is shaped, both in the newspaper and in my notebook.

Beyond that, I am not important except in a very personal sense to the people whom I love and whom love me, mother, lover, and such.

To have an impact is great, but somehow I feel a bit lost in it, people seeing something in me that doesn't exist.