Three months ago today, the central lily pad of the southern waters went under. It had held the centre of that water for a tenure no record could measure then or measure now. The date was the seventeenth of April. The Obituaries Desk marks the anniversary, at the length the occasion allows and no longer.
Its long service was, first and chiefly, to the long-resident frog of the southern waters. For as long as he can recall, the frog has since confirmed, it had been the one place by which the southern waters took their bearings. That was the phrase his April obituary gave him, and the Desk will not improve on it by setting it down again here. Older readers remember it as the customary venue of the midsummer gathering of the southern waters. No successor pad has been nominated for that office. This season the gathering went forward instead on a small pad of the frog’s own choosing, conducted in his characteristic style, which is to say without ceremony and without complaint.
The loss, in April, was met by the southern waters with the brief shock the occasion warranted. It was met by the frog with such feeling as he was prepared to show in public, which was little, and which was enough. The remaining pads have since proved, in his later assessment, “adequate to the season’s requirements.” That the southern waters carried on is recorded here as a fact of their character. It is not recorded as any measure of what was lost. Some things are adequate to a season and are not the thing they replaced.
The three candidate pads the Cultural Subcommittee named, provisionally, on the third of May hold their relative positions to this hour. None of the three has been adopted. The Reed-Bed Subcommittee, asked on the eighteenth of May to recognise the vacancy and name a successor, deferred the question pending jurisdictional clarification. The clarification has not arrived. The Subcommittee has not returned to the question since. As matters stand on the record, the vacancy is, to the responsible civic body, a thing that has not yet officially occurred.
So the question rests where it has rested all along, with the frog. He has not asked the Subcommittee to act. He has not released it from the asking. He holds the matter as he judges the matter ought to be held, at the pace the matter takes, and the gazette is content to leave it in his keeping without pressing him for a timetable he has given no sign of keeping.
This is, by the Desk’s reckoning, the first commemoration ever printed here of a vacancy the responsible body has yet to recognise. The Desk prints it now, three months on, because three months is a length of time and the place is still empty. What fills it is not for the gazette to say, and is not, on the present evidence, anyone’s to hurry. The southern waters will come to it in their own good order, or they will not, and either way the frog will be the one to know.
Recorded, with respect, for the records of this paper.