“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Rob and I started talking about them as I sat on the bed, and we got ready to retire. I remembered and described three of them, thought there was a fourth, but couldn’t remember it. This is the first time we’ve discussed those paintings in … ten years?

I completely forgot our discussion until last night, Friday, when the Gallaghers [our dear friends, Peg and Bill] visited. In a lull of conversation, Peg G. leaned forward and said: “I was at Lib’s Supper Club, and your paintings are still there,” or other words to that effect, mentioning both Lib’s and the paintings.

If she hadn’t mentioned her visit to Lib’s, and the paintings, Rob and I never would have realized that anything beyond usual perception was operating in our little discussion. And the discussion was … extremely clear in my mind.

Rob and I can’t be sure whether our discussion was Wednesday or Tuesday night. Wednesday was the night Peg G. visited Lib’s, and saw the paintings.

If our discussion actually happened Tuesday, before Peg’s visit (which was planned ahead of time), then we run into other possibilities than if our discussion was on Wednesday … (as we thought).

If Rob and I discussed it on Tuesday, I could have picked up on Peg’s plan to go to Lib’s, wondered about Rob’s paintings — and have somehow gotten my question across to her. So that, visiting the next night, she was attracted to the paintings, answering my question Friday when she gave us her account of the episode.

Around 1:00 P.M., as Rob and I finished lunch in the kitchen and waited for the mailman, a fan turned up. A young lad who usually showed up once a year. He was the one I described in The God of Jane who felt himself to be a woman trapped in a man’s body. He has some suicidal tendencies, and I’ve worried about that. But here he was, all grins this time … alive and several pounds more substantial.

Rob had to go to the bank, so he excused himself and left just after the mailman arrived. I read the mail over. This year’s cool August air blew through the house, and I tightened my sweater. One letter in particular caught my eyes because it was from an old friend, Ed, the man who had introduced Rob and I to begin with; a man who we had lost touch with until two years ago when he’d suddenly written from Alaska.

So as I listened to our visitor (I’ll call him Larry) talk, I browsed through the letter. My thoughts went back to the years when Ed and Rob produced the detective comic strip Mike Hammer together with Micky Spillane. Then I thought of Ed’s first letter of two years ago, breaking a twenty-year-old silence, mailed from Alaska where Ed was skiing. In fact, the letter before me mentioned the Alaskan ski trip. That might have been the reference that suddenly gave me small shivers.

Larry was telling me that he had a new job, running the cash register at a convenient grocery store, and I nodded but the (shivery) feeling persisted till the next moment when I checked my predictions.

My eyes scanned the list. Could 3 and 7 — egg carton and milk man — apply to Larry’s grocery store job? These I just marked evocative. Then I thought of another connection with “milk man” — our young fan, Larry, once would only drink milk, he was on a natural food diet — or had been. In fact, I had offered him milk as I went over my predictions … I suddenly remembered something else. That morning before beginning work, I sat at my desk unaccountably thinking about the way Rob and I had met. I had the impulse, for no particular reason, to write about the meeting today instead of writing on this book (The Magical Approach) and spent a good ten minutes thinking about the entire affair. In memory’s quick vivid images I saw the very first meeting:

Spring night; my first husband and I just pulled up in front of my mother’s house; the rushing sounds of a car pulling in ahead of us. Ed Robinson’s voice — the Ed of the Alaskan letter now received thirty years later, (the Ed who was then doing the detective comic strip referred to in the day’s predictions) and a stranger’s voice.

The stranger who bent his head to our car window was Rob. Ed had recognized my husband’s car and followed us, asking us to go to his house to meet his new work partner, Rob, when I was finished visiting with my mother.

*Anyhow — after 20 years we heard from him in 1978 — from Alaska — skiing from Alaska Back Country — he mentions Alaska skiing today. When we knew Ed Robinson — over 20 years ago — he was doing Mike Hammer comic strip for Micky Spillane. Rob joined him and that’s what he was doing when I met him (Rob).

And, in a way it was. The stove we bought this week was delivered. One of the delivery men from Sears recognized Rob and I at once as a couple he had known briefly in the sixties, when we often visited with the Maples (old friends who — again — we haven’t heard from in 20 years) who he had lived downstairs from.

And a kind of ghostly elegance was added Thursday when another old friend visited and showed us color slides taken in London on Xmas/New Years, 1980, and mentioned they all chimed in to sing “Auld Lang Syne.”

“… One morning last weekend (Saturday) Ruburt [Jane] found himself suddenly and vividly thinking about some married friends. They lived out of town, separated in time by a drive of approximately (half an hour). Ruburt found himself wishing that the friends lived closer, and he was suddenly filled with a desire to see them. He imagined the couple at the house, and surprised himself by thinking that he might indeed call them later in the day and invite them down for the evening, even though she and Joseph [Rob] had both decided against guests that weekend.

By this time it was somewhat later in the day. Ruburt and Joseph ate lunch, and the mail arrived. There was a letter written the morning before (on Friday) by the same friends that had been so much in Ruburt’s mind. They mentioned going on a trip (on Saturday), and specifically asked if they could visit that same afternoon. From the way the letter was written, it seemed as if the friends — call them Peter and Polly — had already started on their journey that (Saturday) morning, and would stop in Elmira on their return much later toward evening. There was no time to answer the letter, of course.

Ruburt was well prepared for the call by then, and for the visit …”