A ring and a prayer

Edward H. Walsh was smoking cigarettes with friends one summer night in 1978 on a South Boston beach. He gestured to make a point. His gold class ring from Don Bosco Technical High flew off his finger. He'd had it just a few weeks.

''That's it -- it's lost," he recalled thinking as he searched the M Street Beach in vain.

So it was for 26 years. Tides rolled in and rolled out. Southie kids built sandcastles, grew up, and watched their own kids build sandcastles. Broken bottles turned to sea glass.

But in a tale involving a charging pit bull, a Mexican jewelry box, and a chance encounter among two strangers in a stuffy Boston courthouse, everything changed.

An inveterate beachcomber named Mary ''Fran" Maberry was on her daily stroll at the M Street Beach on a bright spring day last year, looking, as she always does, for what's been left behind. She froze in her tracks when she saw a pit bull. Then she glanced down and spotted a clay-encrusted object with a green stone glinting in the sunlight.

Maberry, a 65-year-old retired nurse and an L Street Brownie, brought it home, cleaned it in the dishwasher, and took a closer look: It was a Class of 1978 ring with the words ''Don Bosco Tech." Carved into it was a bear, the mascot of the former South Boston Catholic school. Engraved inside were the initials ''EHW."

So she asked scores of Southie neighbors and friends: Did anyone have a Don Bosco yearbook from 1978? No one did. Maberry put the ring away in a Mexican jewelry box.

Last month she happened to be serving on a civil jury in Boston and was talking to fellow jurors about the items she has found on the beach through the years -- passports, a late 19th-century ginger ale bottle, possibly part of a human jawbone, and a class ring from a high school that no longer exists.

The jury foreman, 48-year-old Kevin Kennedy, told her that he had an idea: The man he married in June shortly after Massachusetts legalized gay marriage graduated from Don Bosco in 1978, and he might have a yearbook. Kennedy said he would ask him when he returned to town.

Out of curiosity, Maberry had Kennedy write down his husband's initials on a scrap of newspaper. He did: ''EHW," for Edward H. Walsh.

When Maberry got home that day, she asked her daughter to check the initials on the ring.

''She looked at it and said, 'It's EHW,' " Maberry recalled. ''I almost had a heart attack."

Maberry returned to the Suffolk County courthouse the next day and gave the ring to Kennedy. He had no idea that Walsh had lost his ring 26 years ago. Give it to him anyway for Christmas, Maberry told him.

Kennedy put it in a small jewelry box and slipped it into Walsh's Christmas stocking in their Dorchester home. On Christmas Day, Walsh, 44, opened the box, and, Kennedy said, ''his eyes got as big as saucers."

''I was slack-jawed," Walsh said. ''It's my ring."

From time to time, Massachusetts court officials hear about jury duty sowing friendships, even romances. But they were struck by this tale. Maberry and Kennedy were among more than 42,000 people who showed up in Suffolk County for jury duty last year.

''It sounds like an urban legend circulated on the Internet," said Pamela J. Wood, the state jury commissioner.

Superior Court Judge Thomas Billings, who presided over the civil trial, inspected the ring after a court officer told him the story. He shared the anecdote with more than 75 Superior Court judges in a Christmas e-mail message.

Is it strange that a ring would stay in the same place for 26 years? Not really, said Peter Traykovski, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution scientist. He said the ring probably lay buried on the beach all that time and was exposed after a storm or big waves. It's not remarkable that someone found it, Traykovski said. What's amazing is that ''they found the person it goes to."

Kennedy had a similar reaction. ''I felt like the planets had completely aligned," he said.

Well, maybe not completely.

Yes, Walsh got his ring back and excitedly called Maberry on Christmas to thank her. But he is not wearing it.

It doesn't fit anymore.

Jonathan Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com