Luxury in a Shadow

"There’s always something special. You can see what is mass and what is special. Luxury is not how much you can buy. Luxury is the knowledge of how to do it right, how to take the time to understand and choose well. Luxury is buying the right thing."

“Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster” by Dana Thomas, 2007

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Dear Alex,

I looked at it last night and several more past: my budget in Excel spreadsheet. Figures and figurines floated in my memory. Then I thought of Spike.

I first met Spike, whose name seemed as singularly striking as the 60+ year-old man himself, while I was trudging through pre-requisite courses in Seattle about two decades ago. He was the landlord and property owner of my 500 sq ft rental lot - a transient space granted to me as home - within a brown block of 10-20 units planted across a small park leading to the college I had been attending for 2 years.

Spike was also the my wall painter, lightbulb changer, safety inspector, plumber, carpenter, gardener and master of “what is mass and what is special”. He introduced me to his older widowed sister at church, lingered briefly between routine repairs by my apartment door to affirm my studies, his eyes and voice splendid with parables of his boyhood and friendships in Taiwan.

When I returned my keys to him before moving to Las Vegas for more schooling, the luxury of our face-to-face dialogues distilled into our consciousness which Rowan Williams in “Being Human: Bodies, Minds, Persons” would intimate as relational and continual in our hyper-narratives - hyperventilating for truth, hyperbolic in frailty. The drama of consciousness gargles in our throats throbbing with footsteps on track, our strange past swerving from memory or awareness to blend in our ever-present traction for goods and goodness, goals and ghosts.

If luxury is knowing “how to do it right, how to take the time to understand and choose well”, then we are luxuriating in mass crises among cracked bells in our neighborhood of chaos. Luxury sounds more like an atomic scam than dream in our daily news alerts and messy mingling. Whoever speaking of luxury - whether in post-modern consciousness or postmortem of conscience - must have missed the innumerable dust particles reflecting color and character on horizon irrelevant to our cerebrum or fortune.

Luxury is not knowing if you got it all but still giving your all, not choosing yet being chosen to join a grand theme, not buying the right thing because even if you own it, you would lose it as shadow on track after sunset.

Yours, Kate