COLUMN: Where is the fourth season?

From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Print," Fall '99 From Daniel Fienberg's, "The Fien Print," Fall '99I didn't need that stupid groundhog coming out of his hole to tell me that winter this year was a rip-off. Even before the world's most famous rodent -- especially since Kenneth Starr is functionally out of work -- told me two week ago that making travel plans to ice skate in Georgia might be a tad presumptuous, something in the air told me that I never should have brought my gloves back from winter break. The Grinch didn't take Christmas this year -- my neighbors back home still probably have their crZche up. Instead, he filched the whole damn winter. Spring will come soon. Roses. Tulips. Pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training. But we won't deserve any of it. The clichZ goes that "Hope springs eternal." Spring has always been linked to hope, from the Romans to the Romanovs. Even people in Cleveland recognize the rebirth that occurs every year roughly in synch with Easter, Passover or the ethno-religious holiday of your choice. Spring works because of the supposition that hope has been lost during the horrid months of winter, only to be renewed again. Don't get me wrong. I hate winter. The different kinds of nasty weather memories which populated my youth are legion: Hail and frozen pipes in Mississippi. Digging out 36" blizzards in northern Massachusetts. New Hampshire ice storms sending frozen shards of otherwise strong trees pelting at power lines, cars and my younger brother. And Iowa drifts where the snow was as high as an elephant's eye and it looked like it was climbing clear up to the sky. A friend from Miami tried to convince me that his winters were snow-filled until I reminded him that snow and sand are very different things. I'd take his holiday season any day. But then, oh the glory of the first day when the ice on the pond begins to break. Or the wonder of the moment that the first crocus peaks its head out of the rich soil as if to say, "I'm a crocus peaking my head out of the rich soil." When these events happen this year, people won't bat an eyelash. Call it global warming or blame it on El Ni-o, but it's hard to miss feeling that you've lost something, even if what you lost was truly nasty. Not, of course, that winter is truly gone. The gradual warming of our globe has lead to a strange mythologizing of winter. Since we can't have the real thing, Hollywood has decided that viewers want -- nay, need --a winter by proxy. Winter, we learn from films like Fargo, A Simple Plan or Affliction, is blindingly white and bafflingly evil. It's as if the directors of these films where under the impression that snow is always at its freshly-fallen purity, rather than the gray-brown sludge that northern veterans would recognize. These movies and the recently completed Stephen King mini-series Storm of the Century reinforce the notion that winter is some uncontrollable force blinding in its fury. Several dozen years of industrial pollution and a vengeful God have pretty much eliminated that notion in my eyes. Philadelphia was probably a silly place to go to school if all I wanted was winter. This is a city that has mastered the 33-degree drizzle for months on end and where an inch of snow can make back streets unpassable for weeks at a time. But basically, I need closure in my seasons. I need for there to be four of them. I need my air conditioner to break down in the summer. I need leaves to scatter on Locust Walk in the fall. I need to see my breath in the air every morning for a certain period of time. And only then am I ready to see happy people flocking to College Green in the spring. The fact that my winter coat has sadly resigned itself to my closet is disconcerting for us both. I will feel sad when spring fully arrives, because I won't feel that we really deserve it. OK. Fine. I'll feel happy when spring fully arrives. But it still won't be right. But maybe that's just me.