MISQUAH — There is a dark mark on the sidewalk outside the Northern Tap, left there Friday night by Al Lundquist and a poorly timed patch of loose gravel, and at its July 7 meeting the city council is expected to take up the question of what, if anything, to do about it. We would like, with the seriousness the subject does not quite deserve, to make a small case for doing nothing.

We do not make it as a tribute to good judgment. Friday night was not an exhibition of good judgment, and Mr. Lundquist, to his considerable credit, has been the first and loudest to say so. We make it instead for the reason a small town keeps most of what it keeps: because a place is, in the end, partly just the sum of the things that have happened in it, and a town that scrubs away every trace of its own foolishness is left standing in a very clean spot with nothing to point at and no one left who remembers why.

Bigger places have monuments — bronze men on bronze horses, plaques to councils and committees. We have a stop sign that has been debated since 1957 and never once installed. We have a population figure painted by hand by a man who mixes the green himself. And now we have a mark on the concrete where a fifty-eight-year-old man, for about forty yards on a summer night, sincerely believed he was twenty-three. These are not nothing. They are, if we are honest about what actually binds a place together, very close to the whole of it — the small private references that quietly sort the people who are from here from the people who are merely here.

The mark will fade on its own. They always do; that is the nature of marks and of summers and of the things we are sure, in June, that we will never stop talking about. Until it fades, it costs the city nothing to leave it, and it gives the rest of us a spot to nod at on the way into the hardware store, and a story to tell the next person who asks what happened there. The council has eighteen houses and a brewery license to weigh on the seventh, and those are real questions, with real stakes, and we trust the council to give them the gravity they’re owed. The stain is not a real question. That is exactly, and the only reason, we think it ought to be allowed to stay a while.