Today is the 13th Anniversary of 9/11 and I’m always reminded of how I was glued to the TV–holding my infant son–my oldest boy who was 7 months old at the time.

This past week I’ve watched my 13yo start a brand new school. It’s not easy to begin all over again in the 8th grade. In a K-8 school, most of the kids have been together since the towers fell–or at least it feels that way. And as if  being 13 isn’t enough of an obstacle in life, it also takes courage to walk into a new place when you’re dyslexic. Especially when the world evaluates a child’s intelligence thorough reading and writing. But I’ve watched him closely and I’ve come to believe that everything has gone so well because everyone involved has remembered something very important…

“All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten”

by Robert Fulghum

Most of what I really need
To know about how to live
And what to do and how to be
I learned in kindergarten…

These are the things I learned:

Share everything.
Play fair.
Don’t hit people.
Put things back where you found them.
Clean up your own mess.
Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
Wash your hands before you eat.
Flush.
Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
Live a balanced life –
Learn some and think some
And draw and paint and sing and dance
And play and work everyday some.
Take a nap every afternoon.
When you go out into the world,
Watch out for traffic,
Hold hands and stick together.
Be aware of wonder.

Today, of all days, always seems like a hard spot to find some wonder when there is so much broken. My mind will wander and walk with the ghosts of 9/11 and I’ll think about my friends in the military who rearrange their families like a Rubix Cube, in order to deploy a loved one to the other side of the world. As a writer I’ll bow my head to the brave journalists who believe that truth counts for something–everything. I’ll think about how race divides us when most of us only want to be friends. And I’m also devastatingly sure I’ll watch the news and see something awful I never imagined before. But then I’ll watch my boy–my beautiful, brave, flicker of potential and I’ll remind myself that everything we really need to make the world a better place–we learned in Kindergarten. All we have to do is remember what we know.

I will remember you.

I will remember for you.

Tags: 9/11, Kim Sabatini, Kimberly Sabatini, Kindergarten, School, terrorists, war, wonder

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Yesterday was the 10th Anniversary of 9/11.  I pretty much stayed off twitter and FB because I just didn’t know what to say.  All I could come up with was this.  I remember…

Photo By AP/Justin Lane, Pool

I do.  I watched it on TV.  I live near NYC.  My husband is a commuter.  We had no cell phones.  My first child was 7 months old.  People jumped. Heroes filled my heart.  The words are hard to come by.  The memories are vivid.  I took no massive personal loses. I know people who lost loved ones.  I know people who were almost lost.  They all effect me, but it is the ones who, for no logical reason, deviated from their routines that day who capture my attention. They are the ones that fascinate me the most.  Why did that happen?

Like most people, I’ve been known to have regrets.  When I’m caught in a personal tragedy, I’ll sit there, smack in the middle of the mess and wonder–why did that happen?  What would life be like if I’d taken a different path, if I’d just made a different choice.  What if I had deviated.

I think that 9/11 was the moment I began to play with the idea of choices. There were other moments, ones in the years to come that continued to fill me with question, but this one was an extremely large trigger. Were there forces at work that made one person miss their train and another get to work early?  What was the defining line between a miracle and a tragedy?  What was random and what was destined?  I began to wonder if the picture of our lives is being painted on a canvas of massive scale and all we actually see is one small corner of it, like the story of The Blind Men and the Elephant. Maybe we think we understand, but perhaps from a single point of view, the full vision is impossible to comprehend.  I began to feel that the universe was more than I could dare to dream–that is was truly beyond what I could possibly understand.

My curiosity, which I once thought was folly, has become too big to contain.  I want to imagine the unimaginable.  Could I find beauty in something ugly? I’ve come to believe that everything I write is now rooted in this mystery. Looking back I know that 9/11 was not the first time that this strange dichotomy made me restless.  I just didn’t pay as much attention.  As a school-ager, I was fascinated by the story The Gift of the Magi.  I’m haunted by it.  It is why Lois Lowry’s THE GIVER became my favorite book of all time. The ending left me insatiable.  It is why I have written TOUCHING THE SURFACE.

On this anniversary, it’s expected that we ask…why did that happen?  And rightly so.  But I used to think that these words only came on the heels of a tragedy.  They often do, but now I also believe they precede a mystery, a journey, a bigger picture, a chance to deviate.  It isn’t just important to remember.  Sometimes we must remember to ask ourselves–why did this happen?  It’s then that we find something good…where we least expected it.

Tags: 9/11, Kimberly Sabatini

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