Wyatt Burky, 1-1/2 years old and topped by a flock of blond hair sat, mostly silently, next to the towering sculpture, far from the eyes of the firefighters and police officers and residents, amused by the magical powers of a single strand of string which he turned over in his small hands.
When his hands grow larger, they will hold history books that will teach him about the day the towers fell on a blue sky morning, before he was born. They will show images of fires that burned through the night, and explain the sound of hundreds of emergency locators that chirped beneath the ruins. They will tell him how the photographs of the missing clung to storefront windows in Lower Manhattan several months after the buildings fell, and he will learn of the candlelight vigils, the eerily silent skies, the loss of nearly 3,000 people on a single day and the countless more who were lost across the world when the country fought the long war.
He will be told by his mother, Anna Burky, a psychiatrist who worked on that day at the veterans hospital in Albany what a difficult day it was for those who fought in the country’s other wars, and how they knew what the ramifications of the events of that day would mean. "And we’ll tell him what it is to be part of this community, to not forget" she said, watching her young son at play in the shadow of the memorial, when all the world’s magic in a young mind can be delivered by a single piece of string.
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