On the heights along the way, where the paths meet, she takes her stand; beside the gates leading into the city, at the entrances, she cries aloud:  "To you, O men, I call out; I raise my voice to all mankind..." (Proverbs 8:2-4)

"How on earth did she get up there?" the woman beside me asks, with a sense of hush and secrecy.

"I have no idea."  I shrug my shoulders and resume my scan of the day's departures.  Barcelona... Bratislava... Minneapolis... Mumbai... New York -- All right, the 12:20 to New York is marked On-Time.  Good news for me.  I've got a little bit of time still, before I have to make it to my gate, so I decide to get some Starbucks inside the main terminal, before I clear passport control and security.  Sipping my tall caramel macchiato, I sit down at a table facing the frantically-beating heart of this frantically-busy airport.  People are sitting, standing, walking, speed-walking, jogging, and running across the main floor, headed in a thousand different directions.  This truly is the place where the paths of the world meet, and I could hardly think of a better place for people-watching.  I watch a young mother trying to spoon baby-food into the mouth of her squirming daughter, two elderly men in Greek caps talking and gesturing loudly, a crowd of British women wearing cowboy hats and feather-boas presumably on their way to a wild hen-party in the Red Light District, a businessman collecting the papers that fell from his briefcase... so many stories happening simultaneously.

The woman standing up on top of the bank of computer monitors, though, has to be one of the most interesting stories going on at the moment.  She's got one foot planted on the bank of screens displaying arrivals, and one foot planted on the bank of screens displaying departures.  I can't quite guess her age.  She seems young, strong, and healthy (Heavens knows how she climbed up on that bank of screens to begin with!), yet her face displays a certain sense of maturity and grandeur -- almost royalty.  Somehow, she seems the age of my sister and the age of my mother simultaneously.  She's dressed in a fairly conservative women's suit, brown accented with red, and she's wearing a pert little hat like something Mary Poppins would wear.  Her face is calm and her movements are measured, but her words are drastic and grandiose.  She cries out, "To you, O men, I call out."  She rotates slowly as she speaks, so that she can address all the various angles of the terminal, "I raise my voice to all mankind."  And she goes on to speak of wisdom and folly, right and wrong, prosperity and destruction.

But no one is listening.

Every now and then, someone will stop and stare.  Usually a child.  Most cast her a casual glance as they rush off to their destinations, sometimes whispering and wondering among themselves about this strange Lady of Schiphol Airport.  Nevertheless, there's probably not a person in the terminal who could tell you what she's really talking about because they're all too busy, too distracted, too secure in their illusion of this woman as being some kind of escaped Alzheimer's patient.  Still, the woman stands at the proverbial gates to this city, this country, and she speaks out -- coming back around to the beginning of her loop again:  "To you, O men, I call out; I raise my voice to all mankind..."  Something in me wants to draw nearer, listen more closely, and try to really get my head around what she's saying.  But looking at the clock, I realize that I don't have the time.  I've got a plane to catch.  So I ditch my goddess-adorned paper cup in the trash, pick up my bags, and start out towards Departures 2, leaving the Lady of Schiphol behind.