Luxury: (noun) a material object, service, etc conducive to sumptuous living, usually a delicacy, elegance, or refinement.
Living in the lap of luxury isn't bad, except you never know when luxury is going to stand up.
-Orson Wells
Well, it stood up tonight.
I had never eaten at Dico's (if the Colonel had an Asian cousin, he would have been the spokes person for this little number) before. Nor had I any intention of ever doing so since something about overpriced junk food, the equivalent of which one might well avoid like the plague when actually in America, held little attraction for me.
But for my former student, it was the very thing he'd been saving up and waiting in anticipation for, the first meal of a first salary, a chicken sandwich and fries. Luxury.
When I taught him how to open the packets of ketchup and showed him the average American amount used he sighed and said "so luxury."
When our plastic lidded paper cups filled with slightly cool iceless soda arrived he slurped noisily through the straw and grinned "this is the luxury life."
When we glanced from our orange plastic booth into the darkening street below he could hardly contain himself as he sputtered "now I know what is luxury."
When our chicken sandwiches came, complete with some limp lettuce sprinkles, a slab of chicken, a pale pineapple ring, a thick blanket of mayonnaise all lined up in a bun and I showed him which side was the correct side up he shook his head "American food is so complex."
When we had stuffed ourselves, used up every last bit of the three ketchup packets we had been graced with, drained the last of the paper cups, finished answering the random assortment of English questions, and left the brightly lit, neon colored restaurant, he stuck his hands in his pockets and asked "now I have a luxury life don't I?"
I nodded, knowing that in a single meal the word luxury, both in terms of grammatical use and definition, had been transformed for me.
