Toward the end of July, every day seemed to grow warmer than the one before. Temperatures, the TV news reported, were soaring to record highs. When I walked the dog in the morning, by the fence near the bay, I took to carrying a bottle of water with me. Digitaria never seemed to mind the heat but I did, and often found myself trying to cool off by splashing water on my face. Later in the day, waiting for the bus under the hot city sky was an endlessly uncomfortable experience. I kept the small air conditioner in my bedroom running on a timer so that when I returned at night, at least one room in the house was habitable. Once I did get home, I would change into shorts and a tee shirt and then take the dog out again. It was actually quite awhile before I could leave the house at night without worrying about being outside with him in the dark, but finally, my anxiety began to subside. Time passed and there were no more incidents. I traveled back and forth to my job through the hot, pale days, walked the dog beneath a harvest moon that rotated through its phases, disappeared, and then showed up again, looking like a thin, bright scimitar hanging low on the horizon. Amazingly, it would soon be fall.

Every morning I woke up expecting to feel fine—after all, except for the fact that I now owned a strange little dog, my life was pretty much back to exactly how it had been before I had called in to Jack’s radio show. But I didn’t feel that way. I couldn’t quite identify it, but some part of me felt empty. Somewhere deep inside myself there was something I wanted, but I couldn’t say what it was. Now, during the day, my thoughts were often foggy. At night, my dreams became unsettled, though I could never remember what they were about. I would wake up and see the dog at the end of the bed, sleepless, as he always seemed to be in the darkest hours of the night, and listen to him breathe. It was like listening to a shadow breathe. A little gray ghost.

On a Sunday when I didn’t have to work, I took the dog out in the morning intending to walk no farther than we usually did. It was already hot, and I wanted to get back into the air conditioning as soon as I could. But despite what I thought were my own firm intentions, at the point where I normally would have pulled on the dog’s leash to turn him around and head back home, I found that I had changed my mind and instead, continued on, heading toward a neighborhood about half a mile away.

For quite a while now, an old church around here had been undergoing renovations. The last time I had gone shopping at a nearby supermarket, I had noticed that the ever-present scaffolding around the church had finally been taken down and a sign outside proclaimed that there would be a number of celebratory events to mark the conclusion of the building’s restoration. This particular Sunday, there was going to be a blessing of the animals and, though I wasn’t aware that I had consciously thought of it before, I realized that I now had a particular destination in mind. I was on my way to have my little Dogon dog blessed by a priest.

A Catholic church was about the last place I thought that I belonged, so I felt more than a little bit uncomfortable as I lined up on the sidewalk outside the church behind a couple of dozen other people, including families with children who also had brought their pets to be blessed. Many had dogs on leashes, but some were holding cats or birds in cages, or a variety of small animals such as hamsters and gerbils. A few people had even brought lizards and snakes.

I couldn’t remember what the church had looked like before, but it had emerged from its scaffolding with a surface of dark, rough stone scoured so clean that it seemed freshly quarried. Topped by a small bell tower, the building seemed to belong to some bare western landscape, not this busy urban neighborhood, with its mix of ethnic-food shops and brick-faced apartment complexes.

Around noon, the church doors opened and people began to file in with their pets. I could hear music playing inside and the soft, pleasant sound of murmuring voices.

The line moved slowly, so it took about twenty minutes for me to make my way past the front door. My first reaction was to be relieved that it was cool inside. It was also pleasantly dim in the candlelit interior, where an orderly procession of people and animals—myself and Digitaria included—was making its way down the center aisle of the church toward a priest, flanked by several servers, who was quietly blessing each animal presented to him.

When it was our turn, I found myself facing the priest, a gentle looking man of middle age, wearing some sort of white vestment that bore an elaborate cross stitched on its front panel in maroon and gold thread. Despite the smile he gave me, I was still feeling very out of place and not quite sure what I was doing here. Maybe it was just another symptom of the vague anxiety that had gripped me lately that I thought it would be a good idea to have the dog blessed. Or maybe I was just developing a belief in some kind of otherworldly magic, even religion. Even if it was not my own.

Just as the priest seemed ready to bend down in order to lay his hands on my dog and deliver the blessing, he unexpectedly paused for a moment and addressed me—something I hadn’t noticed him doing with any other pair of pets and owners.

“Isn’t that an African dog?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I replied, startled that he recognized this.

“When I was younger, I spent some time in Mali,” he explained. “I was in the Peace Corps. We visited the Dogon tribal area once, and I saw dogs like that. I thought they tried not to let anyone outside their own people have one.”

“You’re right,” I said. “He is a Dogon dog.” And lest the priest think I had somehow acquired him in some nefarious way, I added, “He was given to me. By a professor at Columbia,” I added, as if that certainly put matters on the up and up.

“Well, my friend,” the priest said, looking down at my dog, “you’ve come a long way. Peace be with you.”

And then he murmured a prayer. He almost seemed to be speaking privately to the dog, who closed his eyes when the priest touched him. I couldn’t hear all of what the priest recited, but I did catch these lines: Bless this animal. May it carry out the function it has been given, and may it aid us to think of You, its Creator.

“Thank you, Father,” I said, adding the title less because it was respectful to do so, but because—like too many things in my life, probably—I was taking my cue from what I’d learned from watching television. On TV, priests were almost always addressed as Father.

We left the church then and I led the dog back outside, into the heat of midday, where we began the long walk home.

In my apartment, I flopped down on the bed in my one air-conditioned room and turned on the small TV I kept on a dresser. The dog took up his usual place at the foot of the bed and quickly went to sleep. He did a lot of napping during the day; it was at night when he was most wakeful.

I started watching some cops-and-robbers movie, but soon found that I couldn’t concentrate. The episode with the priest was bothering me; not in a bad way—I was quite touched by the care he’d taken in blessing the dog—but in the sense that it seemed unusual. What were the chances that in some small church in a nondescript neighborhood in the far end of Queens, I would happen upon an individual—a priest, no less—who could not only identify my dog’s origins but knew exactly which African people he was connected to? There was that question to consider, not to mention that I found myself, over and over again, thinking about the words in the blessing that the priest had bestowed, about the dog carrying out its function and, in doing so, helping to bring to mind its creator. As I went back to making what turned out to be another unsuccessful effort to follow the plot of the movie, I found myself, time and time again, looking over at the sleeping dog. His function? His creator? I was pretty sure that no one else who had been at the blessing of the animals earlier—no owner of a hamster or a pug or a parakeet—was wondering about those things as much as me.