LUCKY'S SALAD DAYS

Lucas Charles 'Sticky' alias Lucky is one person whose memory is indelibly etched in my mind, not because he saved me from African lions nor due to any hefty loan he gave me to start a business. (By the way, this not a memorial piece since Lucky is very much alive, though not kicking.) Lucky still retains that special place in my heart because his life had all along been an open book to me, especially the the chapter dealing with his adolescent(puppy) love life.

A junior to me by two years at the high school, lucky was known to me from our Salad days when his imagination had just sprouted wings of a ostrich that enabled his teenage fancy to run, though not to soar; a time when, with an imagination that was out of step with the reality, he could not get over the idea that he was a thing of beauty and boy forever!

Forever In Love

His every waking hour was filled with romance for someone known(mostly unknown); when the fields magnetism surrounding the fair sex inducted electric thoughts that galvanised him into action providing the sole motivating force behind all his ambitions spurring him on to sartorial elegance. His favourite dress was a green shirt on top of a pair of pink trousers that earned him the nickname 'Pink Panter'.He had a kind of special savoire-faire that enabled him to put his foot into his own mouth whenever he opened his trap, a form of foot and mouth disease.

Lucky went around wearing a silly grin on his dial for reasons best known to him and often eagerly awaited at the street corner news-stand for the copies of glossy magazines just to have a peep at (but never to buy the mag) the the centre-spread photograph of some two bit starlet in advanced state of disrobing.

Romance In Air

To Lucky, every film heroine seemed like a demi-goddess and every second gal appeared to be his his prospective spouse in full bridal attire, whom he would soon be leading down the aisle amidst the chants of hymns by the clergy in their solemn voices.

His racing ticker oozed sugary drippings of polysyllables that could together form excellent stuffings for many Mills and Boon romantic concoctions. During one such fit of exuberance, he had composed, compiled and mailed 'an anthology of amorous verses' to the daughter of a local police constable. And on learning of this bravado, I had to apply a thick coat of grease to the palm of the constable's housemaid in order to intercept the mail at the delivery end, thereby saving Lucky from the privilege of cooling his heels in the jug, not to mention a florid black eye.

( To be continued in the next post, Lucky Trudges on)

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