Once, it was all about the clothes.
At the age of 10, my uniform was a dark blue pleated skirt and a crisp white shirt, with a red scarf tied around the neck just so, the left corner slightly shorter than the right, a neat knot under the chin.
I was a Young Pioneer.
Children respond best to propaganda when it’s wrapped in special rituals and outfits. There was an oath to learn, some basic Communist catechism, and a song that went, “The morning of the fiery night nears, we Pioneers, children of joy, the day dawns, our motto is ‘Always be prepared.’ “
Becoming a Pioneer wasn’t automatic. If you were going to make kids want to sit in a classroom after school to learn oaths and songs and rules, you had better make it an exclusive privilege. Someone must be left out for awhile, and I — chubby, clumsy, inattentive, with bourgeois relatives in America — was perfect for making that point. In my class, I was the last one to get my scarf.
The tyrants who presided over my childhood in Czechoslovakia couldn’t keep the old stucco from falling off my school building. But they were adept propagandists.
May is a gorgeous time on the Bohemian plateau. Not for nothing did Macha, the Czech romantic poet, call his famous lyrical epic “May.” Not for nothing was the image of Red Army soldiers liberating Prague in May 1945, tanks crowned with lilacs, replicated endlessly. The air is fresh, dewy, velvety sweet, permeated with the scent of early wildflowers and waking grass. People had thrown off gray raincoats and slipped on sandals. It was hard not to feel wonderful.
On May 1, in our 700-year-old town, across the square surrounded by Baroque and Renaissance architecture, workers marched. They included my parents, in their white doctor-coats, and my big sister, teased hair in tiny pigtails, wearing a Komsomol uniform. We Pioneers cheered, and waved flowers and flags. The speakers blared the Czechoslovak and Soviet anthems and the Internationale, and I stood, braced in a ramrod, childish version of a military salute, tears in my eyes.
We didn’t think of the Haymarket Square Massacre. Mayday instead combined the patriotism of July 4, the rhetoric of Labor Day, and the parades of Columbus Day.
By 1968, the holiday was confusing. Prague Spring had gained us Czechoslovaks some independence, so there were no Soviet flags, but we still lived in a resolute worker’s paradise. So the float I remember from that parade featured an American soldier, holding an apparent automatic weapon, cowering before a Viet Cong peasant attacking with a Bowie knife. Incongruously, the word “peace” was stenciled on the posters lining the truck bed.
That summer the Soviets invaded, and we fled to America. But even through the remaining years of the Cold War, I couldn’t let the special feeling of the first of May go. Each year I bought myself fresh flowers, distributed some to colleagues, and set one bouquet on my desk.
This year, I made plans to finally celebrate the day the way I like best.
The Garden of the Gods is just a couple of miles away from my house. I run its trails or cycle its roads nearly every day. Those hills, with their steep, repetitive climbs, are God’s own gym. After training there, completing gentle, sea-level inclines of the Seattle marathon seemed a comparative piece of cake.
This year, I signed up for a race through the garden on May 1.
So this year, it wasn’t about clothes for Mayday; it was about running lots of miles, tapering training the week before, eating properly, getting to the start in time for a warm-up, and then tasting the freedom I have: to test myself against the hills and the other female runners, to experience the tyranny of screaming glutes, aching quadriceps and bursting lungs.
And when “The Star Spangled Banner” plays before races like these, I put my hand over my heart and sing along with volume, bravado and joy.
Hooray for American individualism.
Eva Syrovy (evasyrov@msn.com) of Colorado Springs is a special education teacher at the middle school level.
