It was my only experience (so far) of having my forebears line up behind me.

My dear and close and beloved friend (oh, all right, my best friend) Julie, turned sixty last year, and I wanted to give her a special present to mark that occasion.

I imagined something precious from our family, like a keepsake, or heirloom, to acknowledge and honour Julie and her place in our family. We don’t generally have a surfeit of heirlooms hanging about, but an idea did, almost immediately, fall into my brain. In fact, the brilliance and marvelousness of my idea fair took my breath away. I was SO excited.

But allow me to catch you up on a bit of history first, so you get the gravitas of the situation.

I met Julie thirty years ago, when we were mutually but independently suffering from sudden-onset-singleness. Instant bonding ensued. Julie decided that we would thenceforth be known to each other as ‘Wook’, after the big furry creature in Star Wars. ‘Wookness’, ‘Wooklet’, ‘Big Wook”‘ (her) and ‘Little Wook’ (me) were all deemed suitable variations. The fact that I was reading ‘The Bridge Across Forever’ (in which Richard Bach and his lover call each other ‘Wook’, also after the movie) as panacea for the ruptured state of my heart, was a coincidence.

Julie moved in to share my apartment. She taught me to ‘group’ my bric-a-brac into related clusters. I taught her that blue toilet rinse carries pollutant chemicals to the ocean and should be shunned.

The outgoing message on our answering machine (hurrah, 1980’s!) informed callers that Linda was most likely out getting the unicorn’s aura cleansed, and Julie was probably out buying drugs.

Like a lanky pony, Robin gamboled into our scene a month or two later, and proceeded to make three a crowd. He made the mistake of chummily calling me ‘Wook’, and was immediately read the ‘Wooks’ Exclusion Zone Riot Act’ by Big Wook.

One night when the three of us were preparing to go to a friend’s party and I succumbed to a migraine, Julie announced, ‘Well, I’ll still go with Robin and Wook can stay home. I can be the Spare for when the Real One goes flat.’

That little gem has never gotten old, and is writ famously in our family chronicles.

Notwithstanding the many trials and tribulations of negotiating our triad, we considered the three of ourselves massively bonded by the time Robin and I were planning our wedding a year later, when Robin asked Julie to be his best man.

We got married in 1989 on the ‘island’ at Balmoral Beach in Sydney. Julie did valiant double-duty as Robin’s best man while also attending to me and my bridal attire, keeping me, and it, flowing in all the right places.

Julie was with us when Yaramin was born.

Not being in need of a godmother, but wanting her role in our baby’s life to be Official, we appointed her as Yaramin’s Fairy Godmother. Yaramin is twenty now, and Julie is still faithfully on fairy duty. (And, by the way, she’s still my ‘Wook’, and I, her ‘Wooklet’.)

So, back to the story at hand.

With Julie (and also by now her partner Anne) firmly ensconced in our tribe in practicality, love and lore, I required a worthy and significant token for the Birthday Wook. The Thought that had landed in my brain was the gold and diamond engagement ring which had belonged to my father’s mother; my New Zealand grandmother. I was over the moon to have such a perfect keepsake, and to have actually thought of it. Go, me! It had been stowed in my jewellery box since my dad gave it to me, decades earlier.

I have a photo of my Kiwi grandmother, vintage 1958, holding Tiny Me. It was the one time she visited us, from New Zealand to California.

Over the years she would send my little sister and I each a doll at Christmas, along with exquisite clothes she knitted for them; tiny booties, beribboned dresses,even miniature elasticised underpants.

I still have my collection of tiny outfits, now dotted with moth holes and age spots, carefully wrapped in tissue paper.

My heart wrenches when I think of the love expressed in that annual ritual; tiny labours of love sent in a parcel by sea to two little granddaughters that she knew she would never again see.

Comprehending this devotion, decades after any possibility of returning it, is a gift of retrospection that has softened me and made me more human.

So when the image of the ring landed in my brain that moment a year ago, it felt like I had realised the ring’s mission. It was Julie’s. I didn’t suppose that she would wear it, but her having it would be a symbol of the connection between her and I, and celebrate the five of us; me, Yaramin, Robin, Julie and Anne, being family to each other.

The first step was to ask for Robin’s and Yaramin’s blessing, since the ring would otherwise have eventually come into Yaramin’s keeping. Both of them loved the idea that the ring was Julie’s.

We were heading up to Byron Bay in a couple of days to celebrate Julie’s birthday with her and Anne, so there was no time to waste.

I marched upstairs to the jewellery box to unearth the ring and…it wasn’t there. Oh, crap. I pulled everything out; no ring. What the….? A knot formed in my belly as I imagined scouring the whole house in two days. What the hell did I do with the ring? And why had I moved it?

Swallowing back gastric waves of rising panic, I started to search. By the next day, the ring had not revealed itself.   We were flying the following day to Byron. My panic congealed into black disappointment.

How could The Best Idea In The World, be hijacked by stupid bad management? I sat myself down and meditated on ‘calling’ the ring. A vague sense started to form: me, years earlier, moving the ring to a less obvious and more responsible type of hiding place. In case of, you know, burglars.

I have a beautiful, inlaid wooden box that holds matchboxes collected over the years from special corners of the world. Had I put the ring in one of the matchboxes? In my mind, I saw it inside a tiny zip-lock plastic bag, tucked into a matchbox.

I sat at the desk, my belly awash with anxiety, and placed the wooden box in front of me. I proceeded to unpack the box, and opened each and every matchbox. Forty or so matchboxes later; still no ring. Even my favourite one; the one from the Harvard Co-op bookstore in Cambridge, Massachusetts (I grew up in Boston), the one where I’d thought, ‘This has got to be it’…not even that one yielded the ring.

Sitting in front of the empty wooden box with all of the matchboxes tumbled around it, I put my palms together, fingers to my forehead, and asked the ring to guide me. ‘If you’re Julie’s ring, please help me get you to her.’ I saw a silver thread running from my grandmother to my dad to me to Julie. I was crying.

My eyes opened onto the Harvard Bookstore matchbox in the pile. Knowing I’d already looked inside, it seemed utterly pointless, yet I felt impelled to pick it up and open it again. I looked down at the matches nestled inside and a voice, somehow in my head but coming from above and behind my right shoulder urged, ‘Move the matches.’

I nudged the layers of matches with my finger, and saw the tiny zip-lock bag underneath, then an arc of gold from inside the plastic.

You can imagine. More crying, with yells and hoots echoing throughout the house. The sense of my dad and my grandmother lined up behind me, willing me to find the ring, was almost palpable. I felt immediately, deeply moved by my grandmother’s generosity of spirit – of course she’d died long before Julie came into my life, but she now formed part of the conduit that connected Julie with the ring. And my dad, just above my shoulder, in front of her; he had loved Julie, and he was also part of the conduit. Their jubilation rose in my heart like a tide. That is a moment of happiness that I will never, ever forget.

I feel so close, now, with my grandmother; like co-conspirators in a beautiful mission, and yet I have no visual memory of her. Oh, the power of the heart in remembering being beloved. I don’t have memories of her, but my heart has reclaimed her.

And my dad, Barry…he was so trapped in his intellect his whole life; he’d carefully explain different equations for infinity for you. The universe existed for him as a beautiful, mathematical symphony, but the dance of human relationships mostly eluded him.

When he first met Julie during one of his trips to Australia to visit me, he warmed to her instantly. She called him ‘Bazza’ and teased him mercilessly, which made him blush with delight. Literally, tickled pink! And when Julie, full of trepidation, confided to him that she was in love with, and living with a woman, Dad hugged her, and told her that if she had found love, she must grab it with both hands. Not bad for an old aerospace engineer.

My dad and I, at Robin’s and my wedding.

And now here he was, almost thirty years later, turning up to barrack for the team.

With the ring in front of me, I pressed my palms together again, bursting with gratitude towards my dad and my grandmother, and for the ring having found its way back into daylight. And for the feeling of the universe lining up my stars for ten magical, mystical seconds; my own Bridge Across Forever.

The next day we travelled up to Byron, and we presented Julie with the ring – still incognito in its special matchbox – the five of us huddled together wrapped in music and fairy lights. We shared The Story with Julie and Anne, and toasted my grandmother and Bazza, and the family that we’ve become.

Thank you, Florence Barraclough, Kiwi grandma, for your generosity of spirit, and for loving your granddaughters over an ocean between.

And thank you, Barry Haigh, Dad, for turning up at that synchronistic moment so that your mum’s beautiful ring could find its way to Julie. I love you to all your infinities and back.

And guess what…the ring fits Julie! Perfectly. And she wears it. And it looks AMAZING on her. Just like…well, just like it was made for her.