The name is known now, and it is a good one, and by October it will simply be the name, the way Sorensen Hardware is simply the hardware and nobody stops to think there is a family attached. That is how names work and there is nothing to be done about it. But before the canvas goes wherever canvas goes, this page would like to say a word about the twenty-six days it spent over that sign.

A correspondent to this page argued last week that the covered sign had done more for conversation in this town than most things the council has voted on, and we think the evidence supports him. In twenty-six days we heard the seven lakes argued over at the cleaning station and in the church basement. We heard a man explain to his grandson why Whitefish is the deepest and therefore the most deserving, which is not an argument, and we heard the boy accept it, which is why we are the way we are. We heard three people defend Cultured Cow in the face of all available information. Sixty-one people wrote down a guess and sealed it in an envelope for a prize that did not exist and was never promised.

None of that was the beer. All of it was the withholding. The Holts had one word and declined to spend it for a month, and in the space where the word wasn't, a town talked to itself.

We are aware this is a small thesis. We advance it anyway, because the general direction of the age is toward finding out immediately, and because Saturday demonstrated the alternative in front of three hundred people: the pause before the noise, the noise itself, and a nine-year-old on a bar being right in public. You cannot get that by announcement. You can only get it by waiting, which requires somebody willing to make everyone wait.

So: thank you to the Holts for the canvas, which was free and which worked, and our condolences to whoever must now name the next thing in this town, having watched how it is done. We would suggest covering it. Not for as long. But for a while.