It wasn’t unusual by now for her to speak to me using her mother tongue. The conversations in te reo we sometimes had enlivened her, I thought, made her smile.

‘Like Taana the builder and Chappy the weaver, you bring new skills to deposit in and withdraw from the shared basket – languages, new ways of telling stories. But you have to keep it up. It can’t just be a oncer.’

In the meantime, there was one immediate task ahead of me, and that was to put together what I could of the life of Chappy Star, framed, contextualised, peopled and humanised by the lives of others. The material that I had gathered originally for my mother, Janny and myself, I now intended publishing for the whole whānau. I decided that, with the exception of some rearranging and minor alterations for the sake of clarity, I would not edit.

And I’ll have to work on some kind of introduction, some words about what pushed me. The wimp will have to confess.

I’d never thought before, and it amuses me now to think that ‘introduction’, ‘foreword’, ‘prologue’ coming at the beginning of a book are probably done last, their time already gone.

When it’s all done?

If I want to stay on in Aotearoa, I’ll need to attend one of its universities and qualify in some useful field, otherwise my presence here will be prodigal.

In some ways, my financial independence embarrasses me, but I am who I am. I understand that now. I’m not about to chuck it all away and go barefoot, and don’t wannabe a wannabe. So, no matter where I go or what else I undertake, I’ll continue to increase my understanding of this part of myself that I embrace with all my heart. I’ll keep in touch, work back and forth from wherever I am in the world and contribute whatever I can from the depth and core of me.

This brings me to the point. (I believe I’ve learned from my grandmother and uncle to ramble along a few pathways before getting to it.)

The reason I’m intruding myself into this text is to answer the question concerning what I may add to that basket, which can be taken out and shared for the benefit of all, ‘nōu te rourou, nāku te rourou’, etc. And how does that continue? How does it not be a ‘oncer’? This is how the answer came to me: