Rachel at the Dog Park (by Andy)

I work nights.

Much like somebody once said that Washington D.C. combines Northern charm with Southern efficiency, working nights combines all the worst parts of involuntary unemployment with the worst parts of involuntary over-employment.  As I continue my now five-month job search, I am faced with the fact that there is much more at stake than simply my vocational happiness.  Because of my current schedule, my family rarely sits down to eat dinner together, for instance.  Studies show that this means my littlest child, Aaron, will probably become a criminal (not that this is surprising given how tough he generally seems...check out that hard-core bib)




Working nights means I never see our teenager, Collin.  When he is at school, I'm at home. When he's on his way home, I'm on my way to work.  When I get home from work, he's downstairs either solving complicated chemistry equations or deftly operating his smartphone.  The two nights I don't work other than Sunday are Friday and Saturday, and despite my repeated assurances that I will allow him to start in South America, Collin continues to decline my invitation to play Risk on those particular evenings.

There's another downside to working nights, too.  People who work 9 to 5 jobs at an office can come home and spend 4 hours watching Game of Thrones while eating pizza and nobody blames them.  But when you work nights, you often find yourself sitting on the couch at 11:30 a.m., wearing sweatpants, eating cereal, and reading Rembert Browne columns on Grantland.  And while I generally keep very busy before I go to work, there is always that occasional time when my wife, who has been awake since 6am doing fourteen million things and crossing them off a to-do list so long that it has an acknowledgements page, will walk into the living room and find me eating cereal and reading Rembert Browne columns, milk dribbling down onto my sweatpants.  Which is great.

But if there's one perk of working nights, it's that I get to spend lots of time with Rachel, our three year-old, who would generally be asleep by the time I got home from work if I worked normal hours.  Every Monday we have Beanie-Daddy day, a fun adventure-filled day that is planned weeks in advance.  Past activities include:

• Taking the subway train all around town!  Did you know they charge you a fee if you get on and off at the same station?
• Taking the ferry boat across the bay.  Did you know there are drunk old men who ride the ferry boat in the middle of the day?
• Being ninja monkeys who surprise grandpa at work with a hand-drawn card
• That one time when we went to a pet store to try to see some animals (cheaper than the zoo!) but the only animal they had was a parakeet, unless you count the store-owner as an animal, which technically she is, but not a friendly one, probably because she realized when I asked about other live animals that we were not there to buy expensive organic dog treats, but then we went to the library but the library was closed and Daddy spent the whole time apologizing for how bad Beanie-Daddy day was on the way home and vowed to spend more time pre-planning the next week, which led to:
• The Dog Park!

See, Rachel is a dog owner, but mostly her experience with our German Shepherd Winston involves chasing him away and yelling at him for trying to eat her food.  Sometimes this is because Winston is trying to eat her food.  Other times this is because Winston is asleep in the next room, possibly dreaming about eating her food.  Regardless, it's not a happy relationship, and given that Winston is a rescue dog with a traumatic past, I felt that maybe this was a relationship that could use some repairing.

So yesterday Rachel and I took Winston to the dog park.  On the ride there he slobbered a lot, and then when I applied the brakes a little too quickly, he slammed against the back of my seat, sending slobber through the hole under the headrest and onto my neck.  Rachel thought this was funny.

At the dog park, Winston ran around a lot, as did Rachel.  Winston went up to lots of other doggies and greeted them, as did Rachel.  Rachel eventually began talking to every person we met, saying "hi, can I pet your doggy?"  Or "hi, I'm Rachel and I'm three.  What's your doggie's name?"  At one point she met a little girl about her age and said "Hi, my name's Rachel, I'm three."  The girl replied by saying her name as well.

Pause.

"I'm Rachel.  I'm three."

She continues to stare at her new friend, who doesn't reply.  Longer pause.

"I'm Rachel.  I'm three."

The great thing was, though, that as we met other people's doggies, they (the people, I mean) invariably asked Rachel what her doggie's name was.

"Pinston," she would reply, because she can't really pronounce it.  But she was acknowledging that this was her dog.  She laughed when he ran around and she petted him when he stopped long enough for her to catch up with him.  Later, when I admonished her for trying to pet a dog without first asking the dog's owner, she said "you're an owner.  I'm an owner."

By the time we got back in the car to head home, I felt like we'd had a breakthrough in toddler-dog relations. That night, I had a job interview with an organization that brings together Palestinian and Israeli youth.

The dog park.  It's kind of like that.