“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(I must say that I hadn’t expected Seth to discuss the event this evening, nor had I asked that he do so. Also, for someone who wasn’t sure they wanted to hold a session to begin with, Jane’s delivery was excellent — usually fast and quite emphatic throughout.)

(10:09 P.M. “Brilliant, hon,” I said to Jane as she quickly came out of her trance state. She was pleased. For someone who hadn’t known whether they wanted a session, she’d done very well, with her delivery being often fast and emphatic. I told her that it looked as though Seth used my newspaper incident to actually summarize in capsule form much of the material he’s been giving us in this latest group of private sessions. “You couldn’t ask for a better demonstration of the whole thing,” I said.

I thought of myself as a woman at the mall in Big Flats, near Elmira. As I went through a double revolving door I caught a glimpse of a young man, say in his mid-twenties, who was an exact duplicate of my own son, who I knew was not in the mall, but was away on business of some kind. The shock of seeing my son’s double was so great that instead of chasing him to question him, I had to sit down on a bench to recover. By then the young man was gone. I envisioned myself returning to the mall again and again to see if I could see the person — and finally I did. Either I followed him to his car, then talked to him, or followed him to where he lived with his parents — but he bore an uncanny resemblance to my own son.

The story unfolds when the mother uncovers evidence of a mixup in the baby complex at the hospital: She had been given only one of her children, or some such affair; either that, or she had managed to adopt a baby from there. Either way, she finds out through much detective work that a whole series of mixups had occurred in the hospital that day — that in the Elmira area there are several sets of parents who have been raising the wrong children all these years. There had been mixups in the hospital because of new help, etc. I thought it would make a great novel as all of the entangled threads were unwound, and considering the emotional tangles that had been built up over the years as parents raised children they thought were theirs.

I think that the idea of mixups in the hospital came from a book Jane and I have been reading the past week, written by a doctor who warns against medicine, delivery rooms, the whole bit, in the establishment practice of medicine. He wrote that such baby mixups are far from rare. Then as we sat on the couch, I remembered that for the first time in literally months I’d forgotten to bring in the evening paper, so we could look at it while we ate and watched TV. I almost invariably bring in the paper before I lay down for a nap before supper, so Jane can read it while I sleep.

On the front page of the paper was a rather long story, with photographs, telling how triplets were united by “chance” last weekend in New York City — a case we hadn’t heard of in the media before now. I’d forgotten to describe my idea for a novel to Jane, but the article immediately reminded me to do so. There were similarities in the story that reminded me of my own experience. The first two of the brothers were reunited through a friend (instead of a mother, say) who noticed the resemblance between them. Turns out the three were given up for adoption at birth, and although they knew they were adopted, they didn’t know they belonged to what actually had been a quadruplet group. (A fourth brother had died at birth.) Their unknowing would match my own dreamlike idea of the two young men living in the Elmira area but not knowing of each other. Even the ages of the triplets — 19 years — places them fairly close to my son’s age of 25 in my reverie, rather than, for example, brothers in their 40s.