“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

New paragraph. Driving through Sayre,¹ Pennsylvania, one Sunday afternoon, Joseph noticed a house for sale in a neighborhood he knew — and remembered that it had belonged, in his memory, to a man of whom his mother had been fond. On impulse, Joseph had Ruburt call the real estate firm whose sign was on the house. The house was still owned by the man in question. Joseph only remembered his mother speaking of this gentleman in the past. In the recognized reality shared by the Butts family there had been no intimate contact between Joseph’s mother and Mr. Markle (as I’ll call him). Joseph’s mother had been greatly struck by the man, however, and was convinced that she could have married him instead of the husband she had chosen. Through the years she fantasized such a situation. Mr. Markle was, and is, wealthy. Now of course he is an old man, unable to tend to his home any longer. He is now in a home for the aged, but well cared for.

(10:12.) Instead you have a rich interweaving of probabilities; for in one probability the two were indeed married, and that Stella [Butts] saw the house go to the eldest son (myself). In this probability, this Joseph instead comes upon the house of a relative stranger, finds it for sale, and can or cannot purchase it according to the new set of probabilities then emerging. There is a cross-blending of “effects.” In this probability Joseph’s mother left little in financial terms, relatively speaking, and her house was sold. The family did not get it.

In certain terms it is the connection, the symbol, between the two probability systems, for Mr. Markle’s house also has a shared drive. Ruburt and Joseph live in double apartments, in a large old mansion redone into such quarters. The driveway is shared with a very wealthy family next door, in which the same size house is a home to one family. Joseph’s mother wanted Joseph to be very wealthy. The drive symbolically connects the two realities, and is a point where the two merge.

It’s an old, predominantly lower-middle-class railroad town that used to derive much of its importance from being a junction point for several major lines; yet it’s also the site of a well-known hospital and clinic that has continued to grow. Sayre’s population was probably less than 6,500 when my two brothers and I were growing up there, and it isn’t much more today. My family lived in the neighborhood Seth describes from 1922 (when I was 3 years old) to 1931 (when I was 12), then moved to the opposite end of town. I remember quite well that I was most reluctant to move; the young boy didn’t want to leave his friends and the surroundings he loved. My parents’ motives for moving were meaningless to me at the time. They bought the “new” house, however, and it remained in the family until 1972 — a year after my father’s death, a year before my mother was to die.

The house the Butts family had occupied at that time is situated just around the corner, a block away — almost visible from the front porch of the Markle place. (Later I found several old photographs of it in one of our family albums, and was reminded that in those days the streets had no curbs.) Even today I can recall most of the families, and their children, who’d lived in the immediate area. Those few blocks largely made up my childhood world.

3. Not only did my mother insist “upon a high price for her own home,” but to the surprise of everyone involved in the sale — family members, real estate agents, and others — she succeeded in getting it.

The place in question is located within a few blocks of the neighborhood to which my family moved in 1931, as described in Note 1. Since it sits on one of the main streets of Sayre, at a busy corner, I know that I must have passed by it many times in subsequent years; yet I’d never noticed the house as an individual entity until Jane and I walked up to its front door with the Johnsons. When the Johnsons told us who the owners were, I could only reply that I’d heard the name while living in Sayre; the old couple would be contemporary with my mother. Although I couldn’t remember my mother mentioning them, it was at least possible that she’d known them. There could have been links through mutual friends. To some small extent, then, Jane and I could toy with inferences drawn from Seth’s comment that that particular house had represented my mother’s second choice. I could hardly ask her, since she’d died five months ago, but Stella Butts could have known the owners, and been in their home; she could have liked it inordinately …