“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

For whatever reasons, she had resolved along the way to do her own thing in her own way—with two exceptions. She went to Andy Colucci, a dentist (and friend) who had his office around the corner from where we lived on West Water Street for routine cleaning (she had perfect teeth); and on rare occasions one or both of us visited Sam Levine, a doctor who had his office on the ground floor of his building next-door to 458. We’d see him for an inoculation, say, or treatment for a cold. Did Doctor Sam ever hear Seth’s booming voice in the summertime, when windows were open, or the uproarious racket made by the members of Jane’s ESP class on Tuesday nights? Yes he did, he told Jane, but he didn’t understand what was going on—only that there were many extra cars parked in the neighborhood on Tuesday nights. And Jane wasn’t about to explain: “Hi, Sam. Hey, I’m speaking in a trance state for this nonphysical entity called Seth—a guy I knew in Denmark three hundred years ago. I wonder if you can help me deal with some of my symptoms, as I call them. They might be connected with my psychic work…” Not a chance! Doctor Sam was a very kind but reserved Jewish doctor who helped many people on a daily basis. Yet I do think that even if he hadn’t accepted Jane’s mediumship per se, still he would have recognized it as being a portion of her psyche.

Next, at Jim’s request we visited the apartment house at 458 West Water Street that Jane and I had lived in when we moved to Elmira from Sayre in I960. We had stayed there until 1975, when we purchased the hill house at 1730 Pinnacle Road in West Elmira. Some years after we had moved out, the apartment house was painted a garish green, a color that was quite out of keeping with all of the other houses in the neighborhood. Now, the color is unevenly faded. The whole sprawling house looks shoddy, sagging almost, in need of general repair.

Another part of my routine at 1730, a somewhat selfish one I saw in retrospect, involved first walking and then running late at night. I’d always been active in sports, and later in dancing with Jane, but as her symptoms slowly deepened I became more and more reluctant to leave her alone except when I had full or part-time jobs. By the time we bought 1730 we could exist without my outside income for the most part as we concentrated on the Seth material. I had my chance, I told Jane: on other than session nights I was free to leave the house. I started out walking, but soon my nighttime excursions turned into running on those hilly streets in our neighborhood. Jane was reluctant to see me go out late at night, but I reassured her that she would be all right in the house and that I would be all right outside of it—and each one of us always was. My solitary treks became most enjoyable, no matter the time of year. I came to know intimately all of the dead-end streets opening off the main road, Coleman Avenue, like steps in a ladder that led up the hill to Pinnacle Road. I encountered wildlife on those streets. I told Jane that my record was six deer at one time. I stopped moving; they stopped; each side stared at the other in the porch light from a house across the street....