One fine, but tough, rainy day

“HAVE YOU taken the dog out?” someone asks.

Tough day to be a dog. Sloppy as a carwash. Rain up to your bony ankles. Poor pooch. Imagine that every time you had to go to the bathroom, you had to step into a cold shower with a rope around your throat, held by someone who hasn’t had a particularly good week. Imagine standing out in the rain with him as he glares at you to hurry on with your business. Yep, it’s a tough day to be a dog.

Once back inside, the toddler is coming at you. He is giving you that Hannibal Lecter tongue flutter as he closes in on your big wet beagle nose. No one is supposed to approach a kiss this way. Except dogs and Frenchmen. You lick the baby and he goes away, limping on one slipper. The things we do for love.

IT’S A TOUGH DAY TO BE A dad. The inmates are up at 7 a.m. on this soupy Saturday, another counterintuitive decision in a counterintuitive world. Isn’t rain on the roof the ultimate sedative? We’re suddenly a nation rich in everything but sleep.

“What are they doing up already?” you groan into your pillow, then turn to find a baby braiding your chest hair. In a house of children, a father sleeps at his own peril.

“Here,” my wife tells the baby, “go back to sleep.”

She tries to wrestle him to her pillow and 20 more minutes of precious rest. The baby will have none of it. He spits out his pacifier and heads straight for the dog.

“At the pet store yesterday ... “ my wife begins, then goes on to describe the horrors of shopping mall pet stores and how PETA really ought to be concentrating their murderous impulses there....

OK. Looks like we’re getting up.

IT’S A BAD DAY TO BE A

softball player. It’s raining buckets. Practice is canceled. You’re stuck inside, with the same old DVDs and cold germs the size of ducks.

“People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball,” baseball great Rogers Hornsby once said. “I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.”

The little girl stares out the window, waiting for spring. At her side, her baby brother. The window fogs a little with their every breath. Two spots around the nostrils. One around the mouth. They act like they invented it.

“Now what?” someone asks.

Coffee. A sweet roll. Newsprint on your fingertips. Headlines on your hands. On a wintry morning, sounds like enough.

“Mom, spa pedicures are so much more relaxing,” a kid is complaining.

An argument ensues. Someone begins to make soup. Rain pounds the roof. I check outside, just to be sure we haven’t slid into the sea.

“Dad?”

“Huh?”

“Will you take me to get a pedicure?”

“No.”

It’s a tough day to be a softball player.

IT’S A TOUGH DAY TO BE A wife. My love. My Patty Hearst.

She’s cooped up in this three-bedroom biosphere with kids who prefer chocolate milk with their eggs. Kids who think “oops” qualifies as an apology. It’s no wonder I sometimes sense in her a wounded yet lovely spirit.

On the counter, there’s this book I’m thumbing through, “The Five Languages of Love.” Our older daughter brought it home from college. Think about it: five languages of love. Until now, I knew only one. And at that, only a few basic terms. Verbs mostly.

“Requests give direction to love, but demands stop the flow of love,” the book says.

This is sage advice. If something is stopping the flow of love around here, I want to know about it right away.

“Meeting my wife’s need for love is a choice I make each day,” the book says, as if reading my very thoughts. “If I know her primary love language and choose to speak it, her deepest emotional need will be met and she will feel secure in my love.”

With that in mind, I go looking for my wife. Heart in my hands. Coffee in my cup. Limping on one slipper. Like Groucho in search of Garbo.

“Hey,” I call out. “I made you coffee.”

Twenty minutes pass before I find her. I’m pretty sure she was hiding.

Chris Erskine can be reached at chris.erskine@latimes.com.