“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Nor am I trying to justify class behavior by noting that Jane and I and our guests were much better behaved during the Friday-night gatherings in our apartment. A fine group of young friends with both similar and quite different interests than ours slowly developed, each one, each couple, dropping in at the end of the workweek to relax and talk. All knew of Jane’s abilities, of course, her growing career with its attendant publicity, but that was only a minor subject amid wide-ranging discussions. Once in a while Seth would come through—though usually only by invitation—but that wasn’t the norm by any means. There were too many other things to discuss! Sue Watkins, a dear friend who was to write several books about Jane’s work with the Seth material, lived just down the street for a while before moving to the country. (Sue’s latest, Speaking of Jane Roberts, is crowded with much frank and loving information about Jane and me that I have no room to go into here.) Peggy Gallagher and her husband Bill worked for the Elmira Star-Gazette; as a reporter Peg wrote several well-received articles about Jane and the Seth material. The Gallaghers were the best friends anyone could have, but we loved everyone. Especially as we came to realize that our having such friends made up for interactions with others that Jane and I had largely missed out on in our own earlier relationships. Valuable!

Given our situation, I took care of my wife as best I could. As the years passed our lives became more and more restricted physically. It became increasingly difficult for Jane to walk in public. When we went food shopping, for example, she would sit in the car in the parking lot, perhaps reading, while I pushed the grocery cart up and down the aisles. We gradually gave up on vacations, in the usual sense of traveling. Strangely, the traveling aspect of the symptoms bothered us the least: we were too immersed in our daily lives with either full-time or part-time jobs (in the beginning), but always with writing, painting, the Seth material, ESP class, seeing friends, and so forth. Jane did conduct several quite successful long-distance experiments with the Gallaghers when they vacationed in the Caribbean Islands. We made dated notes and times of her impressions so she could check them when our friends returned. Interpreting the impressions was sometimes quite difficult. Jane did have direct hits listed, but for other impressions Peg and Bill couldn’t agree on the accuracy and/or timing of certain activities. And sometimes they said the impressions were just wrong.

I do want to record that while we took great comfort in receiving the mail, we also came to receive through it an additional and totally unexpected gift—one that literally we would never have asked for even if we had thought of it. Maude Cardwell, an older Seth reader in Austin, Texas, had for several years been publishing a modest monthly journal on the Seth material that she called Reality Change. When I wrote her about Jane’s latest hospitalization Maude, without mentioning her idea to me, suggested to her readers that donations would help Jane and me cope with our hospital bills. I would have never had the nerve to make such a statement. St. Joe’s, as we called the hospital, had never dunned us for money in the past, and wasn’t doing so now. Our considerable daily charges were mounting, but we had emotionally pushed their import into the background. I was able to make modest payments out of royalty income I had been saving, but this was difficult to keep up because most of that money was paid to us but twice a year. Imagine, then, our great surprise when the readers of Reality Change began to contribute: small checks; medium checks; the occasional larger check. I have every one of those letters and my heartfelt answers in a separate file that I plan to add as a unit to the collection of Jane’s and my work in the archives of Yale University Library.