Craggy Old Mr. Seven

Please don't be discouraged.

As it turns out I am unable to post "Craggy Old Mr. Seven" here because of copyright complications.

I am sorry for that.

But I would be happy to send you a personal copy of my story and will do so if you send an email address to me at walshagster@gmail.com

It would be great to have your name and what town you are from, also.

The version I will send is a fast moving close-up of the action, rather than an observer's view of the story.

Thanks,

Tim

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~~~~~~~~ AVIS WALSH ~~~~~~~

THE LITTLE I KNOW

A Reminiscence

by

Tim Walsh

When Avis Frances Egger (Nana Walsh) was a girl, Grand Junction, Colorado, was a dusty little town with dirt streets. She was born there in 1911. And so, of course, she was not yet Avis Walsh, or my mother, or Mom, or Nana. Just Avis. All of what I know of her, she or Dad told me over the years, some of it repeated or expanded by her at my request during recent telephone calls. Because she was not yet my mother during those early years, I’ll call her by her given name for simplicity’s sake—and maybe as an aide to clarity.

About fourteen months after Avis’s birth, her own mother, the former Minnie Michaels—said to be the most beautiful woman in Grand Junction—died of complications from the birth of her second child, who did not survive. Avis was raised by her father and his mother and by his sister, Aunt Bertha, or Auntie. Standing in the doorway, watching her mother scrub the kitchen floor and asking her to stay off of the wet floor, is the only real memory Avis has of her mother. Her father, Potty, was bereft when she and his second child died and dealt with his grief by walking the streets of Grand Junction almost constantly for days. Afterwards, he never spoke of Minnie Michaels Egger unless asked, and then with gentleness and without apparent discomfort at being asked to speak of her.

Grand Junction was a quiet town a century ago and Avis lived a fairly quiet life. From a very early age she liked to read and was a good student at St. Joseph’s school, according to the nuns. In high school she was such a good students that Avis was often asked to take over classes when one of her teachers was ill or had to be absent. The head of her college in Grand Junction said Avis was a mathematical genius. She completed business college before regular college.

Young Avis got a library card as soon as she was allowed and starting with the A’s read all the way through the Grand Junction library as her father did, carrying great arm-loads of books back and forth between home and library.

Since Avis has lived so many years and I have written occasional things about her, and of course about me, too—the writer always present in some way in what he writes—I will include items such as the following when they seem to fit, despite the fact they break whatever chronology might have emerged. The aim is to preserve family stories—and maybe invent a few—not to tell a single, straight narrative. Writings will appear largely as they originally appeared, modified as seems helpful.