The equality of loss

Mostly, the most awesome memory Courtney Blanchard has associated with her wedding ring is the day it was slipped onto her finger, a little more than a year ago.

The titanium ring, she knows, is no more valuable in sentiment than anyone else’s, though certainly nobody else’s is the more dear either, and this is how things are with wedding rings.

The rings, as everyone knows, symbolize the joining of two lives into one existence precious and complete, the exchange between two people of all that is good within them. The wedding ring is a sign to the world at large, no matter who may gaze upon it, that a commitment exist of the highest order, and so it is more than an article of adornment. It has a spirit and a significance that few items in our society can match.

So at the Rougarou Fest in Houma Courtney – as always – wore her wedding ring.

It was toward the festival’s end, when all the people were free spirit parading near the Brick House on Main Street, that disaster struck.

“We were all just walking and I had a yo-yo and I was playing with it, and I went to catch it and I used my left hand,” Courtney related.

The ring went flying off Courtney’s finger. She heard it bounce twice, in the vicinity of a storm drain. And then she heard nothing more from the ring. But people in the immediate vicinity heard from Courtney.

Everyone nearby got to work without even being asked, combing around the vicinity, looking with cell phone flashlights and screens lighting up pavement and sidewalk, and as Courtney recalls there might have been 20 of them. And then the ring was sighted.

“It was in the storm drain,” Courtney said.

Quickly everyone tried to figure what could be done. A Houma city police officer, who was tending to another emergency nearby, said, if needed, he could get some public works people to come and remove the grate. Someone suspended his cellphone down into the storm drain, to get a closer look.

Everyone was looking for gum, which might have done the trick for retrieving the ring, but for all the gum that usually ends up on shoe soles when least wanted, would you believe no gum was immediately found.

One of the people who was helping, a young man with a little boy in hand, had gone away and come back shortly after with some fishing line, a hook and the nose-end of a fishing rod. And with this tool the mystery man – still nobody knows who he is – was able to secure the ring and Courtney had it back.

There was reason to celebrate.

It should be noted here that Courtney’s ring differs a wee bit from most others in Houma, or Raceland, where she lives. This is because of the story behind it, of which most of the people who helped had no idea.

The first time this ring was placed on Courtney’s finger was in Iowa, not Louisiana. Courtney and her wife, Nadine, could not be married in Louisiana because a few years back the people of the state passed a law that said two women or two men cannot be married, and that even if they were married somewhere else Louisiana will not recognize the union.

So Courtney and Nadine, who have tried through the courts to get their marriage recognized, are still in litigation. A judge in New Orleans ruled – unlike nearly every other federal judge in the nation – that the law regarding marriage is good and just. So now the matter is in the federal appeals court, which has calendered it for 2015.

That a lost wedding ring, because of all it symbolizes, causes people to mobilize quickly to help is important. And at that moment it was the pure understanding of its significance that mattered, not who placed it on whose finger, or where.

At the moment everyone was scrambling Courtney’s marriage, as symbolized by the ring, was as important and special as anyone else’s, no matter what Louisiana law says.

And so, on a Houma street, Courtney and Nadine’s marriage had some emotional parity with everyone else’s.

Courtney hadn’t really thought about this. She is more thinking about how she must do something to keep the ring from flying off again, the result of her having lost some weight. Potential solutions are being examined.

In the meantime, the experience has renewed for her a faith in local humanity, because so many people – including the mysterious man with the fishing line – were willing to help.

“It was just amazing,” Courtney said. “He didn’t have to take the time to do all that, he could have just helped us look. He knew it was special. He knew that it meant something.”