It hurts less than it did...but I miss him very much. Still looking for two bowls when it's time to make dinner, looking for him when I come back from a walk with Chip.

Baxter's best stories were his numerous escapes. For about the first year--maybe two?--that I had him, he continuously found ways to escape from a backyard that had proven infranqueable to two previous dogs. Most escapes involved a minor chase around the block--his go-to escape was to the supply of feral cat food around the corner. He did not reach high speeds, so once spotted his re-capture was a simple affair, not to mention that he never seemed to mind being brought home. His escape skills go against everything I came to believe about his intelligence and I have never reconciled the two (Chip presents the same disconnect, in reverse). Anyway, after a year or two, I gave up on securing the yard and he was no longer allowed to go off leash in the backyard. A couple years after that, he had his bout of vertigo that left him with a permanent fear of going down steps, so the yard ceased to be an option. But oh, the panic he induced and the stories he created in his three or four sustained escapes. 

Second-best, I'd say, was the escape I didn't even realize had occurred until it was over, and which went through the front door instead of the back. I had somehow failed to completely close my front door one night and at some point overnight it blew open. It must have been a Saturday or the summer, because I was blissfully asleep when I got a phone call the next morning from someone at Ochsner hospital, which is a couple blocks behind my house. Baxter had been apprehended trying to enter ther maternity ward ON THE 5TH FLOOR.  Apparently, Baxter had ventured out the front door, plodded over to the hospital garage (one block behind my house), and then climbed his way around to the top, at which point--drawn to the smell of fresh milk?--he decided to enter the hospital proper, in the maternity ward. "Oh my god!" I cried, on the phone, as I jumped up and found the door wide open and Chip still next to me--"can you wait two minutes? I'll come get him!" "No need," said the caller. "We just had an outpatient appointment and I have to drive by your house on my way home. I'll drop him off." (His address was on his tag.) "Oh... ok!" I said, "thank you!" And that is how a woman, at least 8 months pregnant, and her husband, came to drive by in their truck and deliver a completely unbothered Cocker Spaniel to my door one sunny New Orleans morning....