Wisdom From One Newsman Who Figured Out February

Somewhere in the second hour of shoveling the driveway -- during the third snowstorm of what has become an already long winter -- the flashbacks started.

The mind starts to wander when the body is engaged in a thankless task. And the numbing exercise -- push the shovel into the deep pile of snow, bend the knees, lift the load, find a place (any place) for it, dump, get the sticky snow off the shovel, and then go back for more, lots more -- caused the growing number of random thoughts to bounce all over the place.

Sports. Food. Vacation. Work. Assignments. Neighbors. Growing up. Family. Pets. Books. Favorite trees. Best hot cocoa. Baseball coming back to Richmond. Past winters. Taxes. Valentine's Day. Guys always yelling on that cable TV news show. The Saints.

Anything to get through shoveling the driveway and breaking down the wall left by the plow.

And then I landed, for some strange reason, on the legendary Charley McDowell's columns about the dreaded February. It's been a while since I last read one. For longtime readers of the

Richmond Times-Dispatch, Charley was the reporter and columnist who "made sense of Washington and politics" during decades of shared insight and commentary. His first byline appeared in 1949. His last February column was in 1998.

For a comparatively short time, I was one of the editors who had the pleasure of being the first reader of a McDowell column sent south to Richmond for publication in the next day's Times-Dispatch.

Once February approached, usually around the third week of January, the desk-bound editors would start the informal lottery on when the McDowell February column would hit. Would it be early because we already had lots of snow in January? Or would important events in Washington and the world push the column back, since Charley could always pull off another February piece at any moment?

Whenever the column arrived, Charley never disappointed. The February pieces had a common opening, borrowed from an anonymous poem in the now-defunct Washington Daily News.

Thirty days hath September,

April, June and November,

All the rest have thirty-one,

Except February, which is endless.

So as I get ready to shovel the blasted driveway for an unbelievable fourth time, it's a fitting time to reprise some of Charley's memorable views about the month that, even with the fewest number of days, he knew -- after writing about it for 30 years -- to be the longest of all:

•"February is set apart from other months by the outrages it perpetuates, including its fraudulent pretense to brevity." •"February dissolves hope like its rain dissolves taxis." (A Washington perspective.) •"We know the trickery of this month. Over the centuries it has become famous for its pretense to brevity on the calendar. In reality February is distinguished for weather that balefully stretches time, a month as long as the War of the Austrian Succession, a month of Mondays, an addled sequence of snow, sleet, rain, freezing fog, floods, mud, drizzles, sudden gales of old oak leaves, trash, parking tickets, forgotten Christmas bills, and expensive prescriptions. Yes, we have come to know that a glimmer of sunshine in February is just stage lighting for the entrance of furies." •"The only thing that goes fast in February is the occasional misapprehension that things are getting better."

•"Not that anyone would by fooled by February once he got used to the pace and mood of it. It is . . . less exhilarating than the flu. It is the Silas Marner of months. . . . It is 28 Sunday afternoons in Philadelphia, except leap year, when it is 29." •"There is nothing short about February but the temper of man. February is when the battery quits, the snow shovel breaks on the ice, the glove is lost, the galosh is ripped, the milk freezes, the dessert doesn't jell, the cat and the paranoid furnace run amok." •"There is enough of February left to do us in. But February also is capable of a joke in which it undermines our sanity by never getting notably unpleasant. To February, the greenhouse effect, global warming, is a thousand laughs." •"Whatever we don't know, surely, we have learned not to look to February to make us feel better about anything." •"February has the birthdays of Abraham Lincoln and George Washington in it, but actually everyone in the world gets at least a year older in the course of February." •"What interests me about February was how long it seemed, how bleak and relentless, how humorless and, at the same time, how full of mockery for optimists and for groundhogs who thought they had seen a signal of better times." In search for the famous February rants, I came across a compendium of McDowell's greatest hits by former Times-Dispatch columnist Ray McAllister on Feb. 7, 2002. It's proof that some things don't change and the tradition about capturing dreary February at its worst continues here. Thanks, Charley, once again. I think.

Tom Silvestri is group leader of the Richmond Media Group, which includes TimesDispatch.com, Richmond.com, Richmond Suburban Newspapers and their affiliated Web sites, Brick, Discover Richmond, Centro, Skirt, and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Born in New York, which he had no say in, he doesn't believe Richmonders drive any crazier than folks in the Northeast when it snows. It's all madness.