Last Friday, as I waited for Ian to be released from school, I chatted with the other parents by the playground. One woman said that her cousin was a landscaper who was making a fortune decorating the houses in a nearby, rich town. He charged $20,000 for the deluxe treatment, which involved putting up lights on the house, setting up the trees indoors, and then taking everything down after Christmas. We laughed for a while at those crazy rich people until the little guys came running out of the side door.

I guess that shelling out big bucks for glow-in-the-dark homes is not that unusual, because two days later the Times reported on it. They really do have to be the first on the block to report these important tidbits.

Among his more ambitious customers was a man who lighted virtually everything on his property in Bethel, Conn. Not only did Mr. Fancher’s company light the house, the garage and virtually every tree, but it also created a display over a waterfall so that it looked as if the lights were spilling over with the water.

“It would take six guys about four to five weeks to do his whole place, inside and out,” Mr. Fancher said, noting that it cost the customer at least $20,000 for the display and nearly $2,000 more a month to light it. “The first year we blew the transformer out because it was too many lights.”

The Home Section today reports on perhaps the craziest rich person yet. The Times alternates between telling his story with its usual adoration and expressing some concern that this man may be off his rocker. This guy spent months looking for the perfect nickel plated door knobs for his mansion in New Jersey.

So it is with a great sense of expectation that one awaits a look at the latches of his English Tudor-style home and horse farm — the metallic tail that wagged the architectural dog, as it were. The anticipation is heightened by the knowledge that each of them required three different companies and four different craftsmen: designer, caster, machinist and fitter-finisher.

At last, they are unveiled: a clean silvery line, devoid of squiggles. And as so often happens, life is like a song — in this case, “Is That All There Is?”

Oh, Mr. Baxter, that’s it? This simple hunk of hardware took months to create and was the impetus for building a $3 million foundry?

As the gap between rich and poor expands, our only consolation is that we’re left with these excellent stories.