Did Saying 4,000 Aves Work?
With Advent starting on Sunday, marking the four weeks before Christmas, I was once again reminded of the year I vowed to say 4,000 Aves between that Sunday and Christmas Eve.
Growing up, we always had at least one dog, always a large one, either an Irish Setter, German Shepherd or a mixed breed of similar size.
But my father died when I was nine, nine days before Christmas, and when our last dog also died, my mother said no more. It was enough raising four youngsters, maintaining a house and starting out a new life as a widowed mother, though she never once complained.
Undeterred, I remembered a story in my reader at St. Michael’s School in Union about a youngster who wanted something for Christmas and was told if he said four thousand Aves, or Hail Mary’s, during Advent, his wish would be granted.
If it worked for him in fiction, it could work for me in real life, I explained to my mother, making the grand announcement I would be saying 4,000 Hail Mary’s and we would have a dog.
My mother smiled, praised me for my promise to pray so much, but gently told me we would not be getting a dog.
For the next four weeks, I diligently kept at my prayers. I figured it out mathematically if I said 15 decades of the Rosary every day for 26 days, plus a few extra Hail Mary’s every couple of days, I’d make it.
In the beginning, my enthusiasm and determination made it easy. However, as the weeks went on, schoolwork, playtime, and getting ready for Christmas made it difficult. Some days I missed my mark. I’d make it up the next day, I told myself. Sometimes I did, sometimes I didn’t.
By Christmas Eve afternoon, I was still short of a few hundred Hail Mary’s. I began saying them quicker, with less of a prayerful countenance, and simply zipping through the words. My mother reminded me if I weren’t prayerful, the prayers wouldn’t count. Besides, she reminded me, she had told me in the beginning there would be no dog.
We finished setting up the huge stable in the late afternoon, a stable with huge figures that had been in the family since my parents married and were part of our Christmas tradition for as long as I could remember. My sister and brothers went out for last minute visits or gift wrapping with friends and I was alone with my mother. She noticed the stable was missing straw for the mange where we would put the Christ Child, so she told me to set the table for dinner and she would be right back.
Our house was in Union a few blocks from where Kean College is now. In the 1940s, that ground was actually a farm where we often went to pet the horses, see the cows or purchase eggs. My mother wanted to stop in there to get the straw for our manger scene and said she would be back in 15 minutes.
I set the table, all the while saying my Hail Mary’s and wondering how good God was in counting or if He would cut a break for a ten-year-old kid who really wanted a dog.
When my mother came home with the straw, she also had a little bundle of black and white in her arms. It whimpered, it yipped, and it struggled to get down on the floor. It was a beautiful little black and white puppy!
“I didn’t mean to get it,” my mother explained. “But Mr. Hughes, the farmer, asked if I could take it home.” The puppy was the last in a litter of ten, the others were all sold or given away, and the puppy’s mother was abandoning the runt. He wouldn’t have time to take care of it, he said, and pressed my mother into taking it home at least over the holiday. “She’s not staying,” she said sternly, “we’ll find a home for her after Christmas.”
I never finished my Aves. Nor did my mother ever try to give the puppy away. She was cute, cuddly, loved everyone in the family, but was difficult to train. Because of that, my mother gave her the name Floppy because “she just flopped all over the house.”
Floppy over the next years had two litters of puppies of her own, about ten in each litter. All found happy homes. So did Floppy. She was definitely a part of our family for more than ten years until she in her sleep and went on to Dog Heaven.
As each of the four of us finished school and left home to start lives and families of our own, Floppy and my mother became inseparable…so much so that when my own children were born, Grandma wasn’t just Grandma….she was Grandma Floppy.
And I finished my Four Thousand Aves in thanks.
Although this is a true story, Christmas Legends of the Bayshore by Muriel J Smith is available for sale at venividiscripto.com, a book of legends in Monmouth County. Read about Jimmy’s Friend at the Waterwitch Beach, the Legend of the Bridge, a Prayer for the Second Osprey, and 20 other stories about the Atlantic Highlands Yacht Club, squirrels, cardinals, pine cones starfish and Christmas trees and more. The book was written for a Grandma to read to her Grandchildren on Christmas Eve or anytime a youngster needs cuddling and love.
