It happened again on Monday: headphones strapped on, transcribing away. “Cynthia!” “I’m doing the Chairman’s dictation. Is it more important than the Chairman’s Dictation?”

Turns out it was, at least in my book. The company Controller, a quiet, unflappable Chinese lady with a smile like the Buddha (who is my resource for the real scoop on Chinese medicine and culture), was about to celebrate her thirtieth anniversary with the company. (Did I mention that the woman looks about 15 years old?) I was asked to put together an in-house luncheon. And select a suitable present. In two days.

S, J, and I got the Chairman on the phone to let him know what was going on, and make sure he shuffled his meetings around. Thirty years of loyalty meant, even to him, that accommodations would be made. The Chairman suggested a Prada scarf as a possible gift. Barely a nanosecond had gone by after he hung up the phone, and the three of us shook our heads and said: she has no use for Prada. S suggested a gold bracelet. I said okay, but she’s kind of a traditional Chinese woman, so I think it should be 24-karat gold (I’d noticed over the years that lots of Chinese women wear one small, exquisite gold bracelet in unmistakable 24-karat golder-than-gold). “Impossible!” proclaimed S, “You can’t get 24-karat gold jewelry in the United States! It’s illegal!” I took off my thumb ring—the ring I had purchased on 46th street and had been wearing damned near every day for 6 years—and tossed it on his desk and said, “You mean like that, illegal?” So I promised to check out 47th Street and, if that didn’t turn up anything (and it didn’t) I’d zip down to Canal Street on my lunch hour on Tuesday to pick something out.

I kinda get the feeling that S thought I knew about some secret back-alley emporium where I would be the only non-Asian shopping for contraband precious metals. But, like enormous hands of ginger, bizarre mushrooms, live squid, weird fruit and “lucky” bamboo, that which we think of as the exotica of Chinatown is pretty normal to about a billion of our co-Earthlings; so I when I popped out of the #6 at Canal Street, I headed east and picked the first jewelry store that had more bracelets in the window than fat Confuciuses and magic frogs. S had dropped a rather generous number when I asked how much he wanted to spend, so I kept asking my saleslady for the next larger style until I got to the biggest I thought our understated honoree would wear, and I still only spent a little more than half was I could have.

I wasn’t standing next to her when she opened the box, but I’m told she said, “It’s so pretty! It looks Chinese!”

(PS: the food from Mangia was delish, the old timers reminisced long after the luncheon ended and the guest of honor went back to work, and we all nibbled on the cookies and brownies all afternoon. I'll put a couple of pictures on my AOL Blog.)