When A. and I got home from the airport the other night, and were in one of the elevators in our building, heading up to our apartment, I asked the guy who’d gotten on the elevator with us, in the lobby, what the name of his dog was, after the dog, wagging its tail, had snuffled first at my and then A.’s shoes, so that we’d smiled and had said something agreeable to it; and the guy had said he didn’t know what the dog’s name was yet because he’d adopted it only a couple days earlier and the dog hadn’t come with a name, from the shelter (for reasons having to do with the circumstances in which the dog had been found), and so he, the guy, was still trying to figure out what the dog’s name ought to be, based on its personality and behavior, and so for now he was just calling it Fido, which had started out as a joke but which now seemed to suit the dog anyway, he said, so that he might end up not calling it by any other name, even if one occurred to him, because the dog seemed to be responding to that name.