Going to the farmers market with Piggy, I always felt as if we were up to something together. It was fun. At some point, I couldn’t say when, our weekly expeditions became important to me.

On Saturday mornings, Piggy and I would get to the market just as it was opening, to avoid crowds, and in the summer, to avoid the heat. There, we would usually meet another bull terrier, Zeke, and his owners, Mike and Julia. More than twenty-five years later, I still see Mike and Julia every Saturday. After Zeke came Simon. After Simon came Sunny, a brindle like Piggy, but bigger and much, much better behaved. Likewise, after Piggy came Goose, a scoundrel and a thief if there ever was one, and then Minnie joined us. A sorry-looking rescue when I got her, she transformed into a sleek glamour-puss, full of attitude.

Bull terriers are not that common a breed. To see one is fairly unusual, but if you went to the Union Square farmers market on a Saturday morning leading up to the time the events in this story took place, you might have seen as many as four. Sunny; Seamus, a wildly exuberant miniature who looked like a junior version of Sunny; Minnie and Goose, that is until Goose had to be put down. Then there were three.

The Saturday market is loaded with dogs, all kinds. But I have to say, tourists go crazy at the sight of a whole gathering of bull terriers standing together and have to take pictures. The jam ladies always smiled and waved as I went by with Minnie. So did the NYC rooftop-honey man. A woman with streaks of pink in her hair always knelt to pet her. We always seemed to run into her near the goat-cheese stall. Annie, a seventy-something-year-old psychologist who always wears a baseball cap, wanders the market feeding her favorite dogs fistfuls of treats, regaling their owners with stories about her various preoccupations, which include NASCAR races and how to be happy. Where I buy apples, the man in charge of the stand always used to laugh when Goose would help himself to a big juicy one from a crate on the ground. I’d offer to pay, but most of the time the man would wave me away. When Goose couldn’t make it all the way to the market anymore, the man asked me where he was. If the weather was really bad, if it was too hot or too cold or raining or snowing, and Minnie refused to go with me, I felt invisible. I’ve been a correspondent with CBS News for more than forty years. Six million or more people watch CBS Sunday Morning, where I’ve worked since 1993. I get recognized every day no matter where I am, but the funny thing is, when I go to the Union Square market dogless, it’s as if I don’t exist, which has advantages, sometimes. I like being a bit player in the happy weekly street theater that takes place among the fruits and vegetables and flowers, in which the four-legged actors, not the two-legged ones, are the stars.

July 23, 2016, started out the way most summer Saturdays did. It was warm, sunny. Six months after Goose’s death, Minnie still didn’t want to go on walks. She still missed him, still looked for him, still seemed sad, so getting her to the market took some convincing. Bull terriers are exceptionally good at refusing. They’re genetically wired to be stubborn, so we carried on our argument until I tugged and nudged her to the end of our block. We crossed the street, and she gave in.