A spirit in the night

An uneasy chill hung in the air, exacerbated by a cranky furnace that coughed and wheezed and randomly blew gusts of invisible wind up through the metal grates of the living room floor, causing the window curtains to dance.

"I do not believe that anyone dies alone," he said, behind a snow-white beard that gave him the resemblance of a modern-day Walt Whitman.

In life, he believed a person created their own personal karma - through positive and negative behaviors - and there always existed the possibility of a person changing themselves toward a greater good. In death, he believed a welcoming committee waited on the other side to greet us all.

He believed in an eternal energy and that the ghostly form was as inevitable as death itself. The man who spent more than half of his life studying ghosts, last week, became one of them.  

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The artist as a young man

He is depicted as a young man, picking at his shoe with an umbrella alongside his faithful dog, a German Shepherd named Odin, after the king of the Norse gods.

“You look at it and think you tend to be immortal in a sense," he says, "but realistically, you're not.”

He painted the mural, which is 23-feet-long, on the sheetrock walls of the city bar. It includes more than 200 faces of the characters who lived and played here; men with straw hats walk among vintage automobiles and horse-drawn carriages, and mingle with ladies in petticoats. A horse trailer ambles down the road. A clock tower and a widow's walk rise above the Victorian sloops of the old train station filled with long-ago characters who were known only by their nicknames: Smitty and Rock, Scooter and Skip, Donkey, and Sage, and Crazy George.

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Moving On, While Never Forgetting

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.

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