When Baloo was a puppy, he would squeeze through the bars of the wrought iron fence in front of my house and run down the street towards me when I was coming home from school.

He would do this every time he happened to be outside on the steps.

But there came a point when he wasn’t tiny enough to squeeze through.

One afternoon I got off the bus as usual and I saw him sitting on the top of the steps. He had seen me and ran down the steps. I kept walking, waiting for him to meet me halfway. When I heard crying and saw his little head through peeking through the gate. 

He had gotten stuck.

I started laughing and ran towards him. He had tried to squeeze the bars of the gate like he usually did but his tummy had gotten too big to slide through.

I pulled out my keys to unlock the gate while he squirmed and kept giggling. 

One of our biggest pet peeves with that dog was that he would sneak out of that gate and we would have to run around the neighborhood trying to find him. So all I could think was, “that’s what he gets.”

I swung open the gate and locked it again. I sighed and set down my saxophone case as I squeezed him and shimmied him out.

I cuddled him, which he hated, and set him down.

I wish I could say that was the last time he tried squeezing through the fence and that he had learned his lesson.

But it wasn’t.

Baloo is feeling better, the vet prescribed him some antibiotics and he found that there is something wrong with his liver. He wants to see how he reacts to what he’s given him before making any other decisions.

He is fighting.