Time passes and things change, but my grandfather will always tell the story about how he courted and wooed Luck the same way.

“It was difficult to catch her,” he’d say, “She has a tricky way about her, a tendency to land when you least need her and disappear when you are in your most dire straits.”

The secret was to appeal to her ego. She may seem aloof and uncaring when it comes to the plight of mortal men, but really she craves the attention.

Every time you cry out, “My lucky day!” or “What good luck” she gets a quiet satisfaction, knowing that the impacts of her flights and fancies are well felt amongst us humble earth dwellers.

He really had to piss her off to get her to notice him. He started embroiling himself in every misfortune he could of. Losing his job, leaving his home and heading off to unknown roads. He let himself get beat and bruised by street gangs, spat at by spoilt children on the street.

“I was testing her,” said my grandfather, “I was testing her compassion... and perhaps her arrogance too.”

It was only on the worst day of all, when my grandfather found himself shivering with pneumonia by a street lamp, drenched in rain and losing his senses, that Lady Luck finally showed herself.

She emerged through the rain droplets, a golden and shimmering entity, with beautiful silken robes and long lustrous hair. Her eyes were shiny and black, unnerving and alluring at the same time.

My grandfather was frozen in awe when she leaned towards him.

“You win, boy,” she said, in a voice that was like all the women he had ever known and none of them, “You’ve got my attention. You’ve got me.”

Mustering every inch of his faculties, my grandfather said through trembling lips, “Who are you?”

She leaned even closer, so her silken robes razed against my grandfather’s heaving chest. She smelt like uncanny opportunity and unexpected beginnings. “Luck,” she said, and somehow, my grandfather instinctively knew, deep in his soul that was she was telling the truth. “Now that I’m here,” she said, “Please, please, please don’t fuck it up.”

At this point in the story all the younger kids will start cracking up at grandfather’s use of vulgarity, and my parents and aunts and uncles will grimace in annoyance. They’ve heard the story too many times and are too resigned to disapprove in any meaningful way. I always look at grandfather in the eyes here, knowing the best part of the story is the end.

“And just like that, Lady Luck disappeared. In her place was a young nurse, trained in the war, with warm eyes and a stern jaw. She looked at me with concern and offered to take me to the hospital. That day I met your grandmother and became the Luckiest Man Alive.”

It’s been ten years since grandmother passed away, but grandfather still tells the story the same way.