“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

The camouflage days pass with blessed speed as Laurel and I savor them in all of their complexities. Our journey together continues with new insights, new challenges, new understandings. We were married on December 31, 1999. Thank you, Laurel. I love you.

In 1931 in Saratoga Springs, New York, Jane’s father, Delmer Roberts (or Del) chose to exercise the probability that he would leave his wife Marie and their daughter Jane, who was not yet three years old. Marie’s mother, Mary Finn, called Minnie, lived with the family and often served as Jane’s nanny. Jane was a second child following her mother’s earlier miscarriage. Already Marie was showing signs of arthritis. Jane and I came to believe that it was hardly accidental that her mother quickly became bedridden—for life—following the departure of her husband. Minnie Finn was killed by a hit-and-run speeding motorist one icy winter day on her way to the corner store to buy the young girl some shredded wheat for supper—a tragedy that Marie never stopped blaming her daughter for. The two went on welfare. A series of housekeepers, of varying abilities and temperaments and staying powers, were provided for them over the early years. The young Jane spent almost two years in a Catholic orphanage for women while her mother was hospitalized. Some of the housekeepers had been—and some still were—prostitutes, Jane told me. They took care of Marie’s physical needs—tasks that in her later teens Jane would often take care of herself. With welfare’s help Marie set up a telephone answering service for local doctors that she ran from her bed. The two women’s Catholicism became even stricter: it was often bolstered by the head of the local church coming to Sunday dinner at the old two-family house at 92 Middle Avenue, in one of the lower-income sections of Saratoga Springs.

Mary Dillman, a volunteer, works with and cares for the collection at the library. She has been, and is, a great help in organizing that mass of material, coordinating and computerizing it for researchers in a number of interesting ways that Jane and I hadn’t thought of doing “way back when” my wife was delivering the sessions. Ways that, indeed, wouldn’t have been possible even if we’d had the camouflage time to carry them out in those long-ago days. The blinding speed and depth of association via modern technology simply hadn’t existed.