Walk through all the places that your life used to be in

Just as I don't specifically remember learning my ABCs or the lyrics to "Old McDonald Had a Farm," I can't recall exactly when it was that I first learned drill commands (e.g., Atten-TION! About FACE! Company HALT!). I feel as though I've always known how to precision-march. To this day, I have a semi-Pavlovian response to "At ease." 

I do remember where I learned these commands: in gymnastics class. A lot of parents enroll their kids in extracurriculars like karate, soccer, or ballet when they get to be four or five years old, and I think that's how old my sister and I were when my mom signed us up for gymnastics. Both of us gave it up by the time we were teenagers -- my sister remembers throwing in the towel when a growth spurt made her too tall to compete effectively; I remember quitting in dramatic fashion after a brutal warmup where we had to hold middle splits and were repeatedly punished with wall-sits if we fell over -- but gymnastics was our thing during the elementary school years. Oddball details from that time will occasionally pop into my mind with that strange, fragmented potency of childhood memories, such as the distinctive rubber smell and confounding European sizing of the shoes. Or how it felt to do a pullover on the uneven bars. Or being super excited to get that new crushed red velvet leotard (and then putting it on and feeling very self conscious about how my body looked in it). Or practicing backbend kickovers in the yard and falling over repeatedly. Or how we'd begin practices by marching into the gymnasium on the beat to "LEFT! LEFT! LEFT right LEFT!" and then halting and right-facing and standing stoically at attention.

---

The great paradox of childhood is that even though it's arguably the most significant period of your life -- in terms of establishing all of the default settings of your personhood, laying the foundations for what you will forever implicitly consider "normal" -- your memories of it are shaky at best. It's typically a hazy patchwork of isolated incidents, filtered through a child's warped sense of proportion. (It's like that John Mulaney bit from a few years ago: "My brothers and sisters and I had this babysitter named Veronica when we were kids... And in my head, when I was a little kid, I thought that Veronica was, like, 25, 30 years old. I was just talking to my mom the other week, and I find out that when I was ten, Veronica was thirteen. So why was she in charge? All she could do was dial the telephone a little better than I could.") There are a lot of things we were taught as children but have zero memory of learning, and a lot of supposedly clear memories that are incomplete or distorted. Usually, these memories stay incomplete or distorted, just because we have no reason to revisit or doubt them. The stakes are basically nonexistent. Mulaney could've easily gone to his deathbed still thinking Veronica was a twenty-something babysitter, and it wouldn't have mattered.

I say this because yesterday, at the age of 30, I suddenly and apropos of nothing discovered that my childhood was to some degree shaped by a pan-Slavic fitness movement ideologically tied to Czech nationalism.

---

Because we did drill commands in my gymnastics club, I've always implicitly assumed that learning drill commands was part and parcel of all gymnastics, just like how all tykes enrolled in ballet learn to stand in first position. Yesterday, a passing remark from GR prompted me to actually go a-googling to confirm my assumption.

To my genuine surprise, I discovered that quasi-militaristic marching exercises are not necessarily part of standard American gymnastics. My sister and I belonged to a gymnastics program called Sokol, which I'd always assumed to be a local thing, like your various county-sponsored youth soccer leagues. And while it may have been true that our Sokol was a local gymnastics program run by friendly neighborhood Eastern Europeans, what I learned yesterday was that my assumption was incomplete. Sokol, as an organization, was apparently founded by a couple of Czech guys in the 1860s as a physical-education program (today we'd probably be calling it a wellness movement) for the purpose of providing "physical, moral, and intellectual training for the nation." Like present-day wellness programs, Sokol was part phys-ed, part ideology: as the Wikipedia page explains, though Sokol focused on physical training -- including gymnastic exercises, marching drills, weights, and fencing -- it also incorporated the nationalistic sympathies of its co-founder, Miroslav Tyrš. As the organization grew in popularity, Sokol's implicit political philosophies became interwoven with Czech nationalism and various pan-Slavic movements into the 20th century. The official American iteration of Sokol -- judging from the American Sokol Organization website -- seems a bit self-conscious about shedding the ideological weight of history, but it still positions itself as "a cultural organization that respects our heritage, evidenced by our culinary and beverage appreciation of all things Czech"  and also its embracing of "ethnic dances."

Meanwhile, the adorable website for what I presume was my hometown Sokol club appears to have barely changed since 1998. Its main page features what looks like a photo of a little girl with the "nihilistic French art film" filter applied.

There's a 99% chance that my mom can (and will) fill in some of the blanks here. For example, did mom's choice to set us up with a Sokol gym have something to do with the fact that we're ethnically Polish? (Seems plausible, but maybe not. Could've just been the nearest gym.) Was I actually enrolled in gymnastics for as long as I think I was? Were there any other aspects of our suburban Sokol program that were noticeably Sokol things, rather than normal-gymnastics things? (Also, I'm now beginning to wonder if there is such a thing as "normal-gymnastics"? Do all gymnastics programs have fascinatingly specific ethnic origin stories?) 

I've deliberately written this before talking to my mom, trying to sort out everything I think I remember before confronting my memories with her more complete and accurate account of my childhood. (I also suspect that she'll tell me that we've talked about Sokol's Slavic origins before, though not in the detail I uncovered here. I vaguely recall this, I think, though I've also forgotten.) More of my own memories will likely come into focus once we talk, and I'll have more data of my own to work with. 

As is typically the case with evolving family lore (and, really, all history), the facts here haven't changed. What's changed is my sudden interest in coming to a more complete narrative of how this eccentric fact -- the fact of my familiarity with drill commands -- came to be. It doesn't matter, but it matters to me.

... 
Dismissed.