Punxsutawney Phil, you over-hyped weather rat. You let us down. You dampened our spirits. You … ahhh, why do we care whether an over-sized groundhog sees his shadow any way? I shouldn’t blame poor Phillip. We’re smart people. We know better than to put our good faith in the hands of over-fed marmots. You know, I’ve heard groundhogs are also referred to as land-beavers or whistle-pigs, and you should never trust anything called a whistle-pig.
But we want to believe. We want to think that the groundhog might just be able to dispose of this gloomy time of year. That time when even we bright and cheery Floridians — normally drenched in a cocktail of sun — start to doubt whether the shiny stuff will ever re-emerge. We wonder why we’ve been forsaken and yell out at the heavens: “We’re lookin’ like cave fish down here, oh Lord. Bring us back our rays!”
When the clouds don’t break and worse, torture us with a tinkling of monotonous drizzle that has plagued us the past week, we turn to critters who look like they should lay off the carbs.
Why? Because we want hope — to make a clean break with winter and get jiggy with spring. Remember spring? That time of year when wilted and frost-burned vegetation sparks back to life and drowns us in heaps of lung-choking pollen?
Sure, we have to wear gas masks, but it’s bright, vibrant and green. The way Florida was meant to be. Shoot, we can brave the cold, but we can’t take the gray!
I guess we don’t have it so bad. Not like up north. My wife is originally from Long Island, and I remember the first time I traveled to her homeland. It was deep in the thick of that cruel winter crud known un-affectionately up north as January. I stepped off the plane and marveled at the landscape — barren, desolate and depressing. Sticks with no leaves jutted up out of the land, and the sky seemed like a mirror image of the dirty, slush-filled roads beneath them.
“I didn’t hear about a nuclear bomb going off in Long Island?” I remember thinking to myself as I surveyed the winter wasteland — that gray apocalypse.
We don’t have that down here, thank goodness. But we’re spoiled, us true Floridians, and we want it all. It’s harder on us when we lose our warmth, and especially our sunlight.
When it dips behind that endless curtain of soggy sky (it looks like gravel ice cream) we gather in the street and wonder whether we’ll make it through.
“I found myself staring at a desk lamp last night and now there’s a purple spot burned into my cornea.”
“Oh yeah, well I slept with a carton of orange juice.”
We get depressed and angry. We grumble, hunch over like turtles and run stop signs. We don’t make eye contact and curse at each other for no apparent reason.
And that darn Punxsutawney Phil — with his big, fluffy land-beaver coat — just dashes out and smashes all our hopes. Sure we shouldn’t have hitched them to a groundhog, but we need something to believe in, even if it’s a marmot.
Maybe we need a guaranteed morale booster— something that we know won’t let us down.
Maybe we should have Gloom-Be-Gone Day instead. All across the nation we could gather with flashlights and artificial flowers and sing songs like, “The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow.” I made up my own song: “Burn my britches. Slather on the Crisco. Goin’ to the beach and havin’ me a disco.”
So I’m sorry, Phil., but it’s just not working out. We Floridians are desperate for our sunlight and you’re just not cutting it as the weather rat anymore.