“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In another system of reality your father was — in fact, still is — a well-known inventor, who never married but used his mechanically creative abilities to the fullest while avoiding emotional commitment. He met Stella (my mother). They were going to be married — and in terms of years, the same years are involved, historically. At one time, then, in your father’s past as you think of it, having met Stella, he did not marry her after all. His love was for machinery, the speed of motorcycles, mixing creativity with metal. At that point of intersection, equal desires and intents within him became like twin nuclei. Whole regroupings of energy occurred, psychological and psychic implosions, so that two equally valid personalities were aware in a world in which only one could live at a time.

The Butts family albums contain numerous photographs of my father as a young man, many of them self-taken with the aid of a timer; he poses with a variety of automobiles and motorcycles through the years before his marriage to my mother in 1917, and afterward, too. Sometimes he’d assembled the vehicles himself, or modified them in his own ways. In 1922 he took his wife and children (I was 3 years old, Linden not yet 2) on a six-month motor trip from the East Coast to California. When our touring car broke a rear axle on a remote dirt road in Montana, he fashioned a substitute in a blacksmith shop.