A Valentine's Day Ode To The DF&C

(Portions originally published in February 2009)

It's possible that you may have seen the Dear Friend & Conscience in your travels. She is tall, strikingly beautiful and walks with a self-possession that barely conceals the fires that burn brightly within her.

You may have seen the DF&C between acts at the Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center.

At a Cajun music festival in Rhode Island.

Working as a volunteer at a charity equestrian event in Pennsylvania.

Standing in the crowd at Epsom Downs during a Golden Jubilee appearance by Queen Elizabeth or strolling with a girlfriend on the beaches of the Isle of Man.

Feeding deer and feral cats.

Scanning the skies, binoculars in hand, for eagles, hawks and other raptors.

Cheering Joe Flacco at a sports bar in her Baltimore Ravens jersey.

Or if life should deal you a bad card, standing over your bedside as you emerge from post-surgery anesthesia at a leading metropolitan New York hospital.

I have known the DF&C for perhaps 30 years, but we have been together for only 13, and while it was perhaps inevitable that we would become much more than acquaintances, it took the death of a close mutual friend to create this Pisces-Virgo tandem.

The DF&C is an "Itwegian," part Italian and part Norwegian. Those inner fires are from her maternal ancestry in a village in the Italian Alps via Australia, while her centeredness and sensibility arrived with a paternal ancestor from the Norwegian outback in the 19th century.

As a mongrel with a Heinz 57 background, I come up short on being centered and sensible, but the DF&C is always reliably there to knock me on my butt with one hand when I screw up while offering me the other when I need to get back up.

Now that is true love.