Jazz Hands

Reading over some old journal entries, I was reminded of the importance of record keeping. The journal that I read was from a summer camp I worked at five or six years ago. I had kept a pretty detailed record of people’s names and events and as I read them, I found memories coming back that I had long thought forgotten. The memories were jolted back: faces, places, stories and feelings. Reading an old journal is like getting a whiff of a particular soap or kind of wood and experiencing a rush of remembrance.

Journaling is something that I do sometimes, but with so little time to write, I usually forgo record keeping in favor of other writing projects. It is something I should really take time to do, especially in this time before I leave my school. I will begin to forget a lot of things about my job, much of it purposely. I take comfort that many of my most traumatic students will be but a blur in 5 years. After all, I can only remember a single name from my time as a camp teacher, and that is one that I have made an effort to maintain. But there are a lot of things worth remembering about the last three years, both good and bad.

For example it would be a tragedy to forget about Kimberly’s jazz hands. Every day, when my 6th graders rush in from lunch, I am usually sitting at my desk, savoring the last few minutes of silence that come with my 20 minute lunch break. That is when Kim comes in. She come up to me slowly, like a tiger stalking a gazelle. Then, with the kind of psychotic glee that only an 11 year old can have, she waves her hands in my face proclaiming “Jazz Hands!” I am not sure why she does it. I’m not sure where she got the idea. But Kim’s day is not complete unless she waves her Jazz hands in front of my face maniacally. Oddly, we don’t really have much of a relationship outside of that. She does her work and doodles random baseballs with dog noses on her paper, but the Jazz hands are sacred. It has become a strange game where I pretend to hate it and try to ignore her, but she persists until I finally give in and reciprocate the jazz hands. Satisfied and victorious, she takes her seat and that is the last interaction we have until the next day, when the whole thing is repeated.

A few weeks ago, I didn’t come to school because I was sick. I figured that, for once, I had won the battle and had avoided her daily hand waggling. But I was wrong. When I arrived to school the next morning, I found a note on my desk. When I opened it, it just contained two words. You guessed it.

“Jazz Hands.”