A Pilgrim’s Digression

“The Sibyl, with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and unperfumed, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the god.” Heraclitus

Exactly one year ago, I wrote in Breakfast del trashcan about a crone I had been seeing around town.

She is an elderly white lady, stooped and tottering as she walks. She wears several layers of clothes and usually has a kerchief of some kind tied around her head. Her distinguishing feature is her cane, which she has decorated like a May pole with strips of yellow crime scene ribbon and orange and pink construction zone tape.

The first time I saw her, she was walking down the street, poking with her stick at the mulch around the bases of trees planted in the sidewalk. She muttered unintelligibly to herself. Second time I saw her, she got on the bus I was riding to work, and I was able to hear some of what she said. I last saw her on October 28, 2004.

What are the chances that exactly a year later, to the day, I would see this woman again? Yet this morning, as I was walking up C street SE towards 2nd st. SE, on my way to work, there she was.

I heard her first; she was ahead of me, just standing there beside the fence that runs alongside St. Peter’s. She was disputing with passersby, who dutifully ignored her. A well-dressed man on his way to work passed her, and she said something to him. He turned around and said (I only caught the last part), “…you old bitch.”

She stood there looking after him, raising her cane and shouting unintelligible threats and imprecations. I seem never to be able to understand anything she says. The words don’t connect with even the semblance of reason, and it’s nearly impossible to retain them in memory without ordering them in a rational way that ruins the total randomness of her poetic selection of phrases.

As the man she had apparently insulted passed me, he said, “What a loony.” Apparently he wanted my affirmation, but I didn’t respond. As I approached the woman, she was still shouting after the man who had called her an old bitch.

“How are you today?” I said, slowing as I approached her.

“Now you’re caught,” she replied, looking directly at me. “And goodbye for you, Son of a Bitch.”

I nodded and smiled and went on.

Sometimes I wonder if this woman has not stepped right out of a fairy tale onto the streets of Washington. One man looks at her and sees a “loony,” I look at her and see a crone or a prophetess, a witch from the dark forests of myth. I try hard to listen to everything she says and keep it, but like the Sibyl of Cumae, often we read into her sayings exactly the wrong things, to our detriment.

She could have been prophesying my death, or my imminent exposure in the CIA leak investigation as Miller’s source for the name of undercover agent, Valerie Flame. Who knows?

Perhaps if I see her again tomorrow, I’ll ask the Sibyl to elaborate on her prophecy. Today, after speaking her wisdom to me, she doddered up the sidewalk just behind me, still talking. When I turned onto 2nd street, she did to, but she walked in the middle of the street right up to the intersection with Independence Avenue SE. Thankfully, it was before dawn, so the street was empty. There we parted ways, me off to the coffee shop, and she…I don’t know where she went. One moment I saw her standing there on the corner, the next moment I lost sight of her. All that remained was her voice; I could still hear her all the way down the street. Now have I interpreted her prophecy correctly, and will I heed what she has told me?