Mayor Holt Leaves for a Week at an Undisclosed Location He Will Identify Only as 'North of Here'

OKLAHOMA CITY — Mayor Holt has left the city for a weeklong family vacation, City Hall confirmed, at a location the mayor described, when pressed, as 'upstate,' and which his office, when pressed further, declined to describe at all.

The first deputy mayor will run daily operations from Aug. 16 to 23, and the mayor will receive regular briefings from senior staff, who will presumably know where to send them. No public events are scheduled. The mayor's aides said the family deserved privacy, a principle the mayor has invoked on his own behalf more readily than on behalf of the previous occupants of his office.

The city's press corps, which has spent the week filing stories under variations of the headline 'Where Is the Mayor,' has so far established that the mayor is north of the five boroughs, that the set of places north of the five boroughs includes Canada, and that City Hall would prefer not to rule out Canada on the record.

Supporters of Mayor Holt noted that mayors take vacations, that the deputy mayor is competent, and that a family's whereabouts are nobody's business. Opponents noted that the same mayor's party has described other officials' vacations as abandoning the city in a crisis, and that there is always a crisis. The Press's vacation desk notes that 'well-earned rest' and 'AWOL' are the same week, filed under different parties.

"He is reachable," said one aide, declining to say from where.

At press time a state road map on the wall of the City Hall press office had been updated with a black marker across the entire upper half and a single pushpin placed, helpfully, inside the black.