A.T.O.M.

A casual reader of this blog might wonder what "A.T.O.M." is, and what is has to do with running, the ostensibly subject of this blog.  But all shall be explained.  And this is the season of wonder, after all:

Oh, star of wonder, star of night,
Star with royal beauty bright.
Westward leading, still proceeding,
Guide us with thy perfect light.

This morning we packed our running clothes and proceeded eastward, not westward, to Brevard, where in the morning the 14th Annual Brevard Reindeer Run was scheduled.  It will have been only nine days since our Thanksgiving Day 5-K in Greensboro, but this is a race we had identified on the race calendar and wanted to run.  Last year, we actually drove over to Brevard for the race, checked out the course, but deterred by cold rain did not run it.  So this year was a kind of Reindeer Redemption, I suppose.

We had decided to spend this weekend enjoying more than one kind of activity.  The first thing we did was drive through Brevard to the South Ridge Shopping Center near the Asheville Airport, where we spent some time Christmas shopping.  Then we returned to Brevard and visited the Transylvania Heritage Museum, a place we had never visited despite eating lunch over the years at Marco Trattoria directly across the street.   We had read about a display of A.T.O.M.s, an acronym for the Aluminum Tree and Aesthetically Challenged Seasonal Ornament Museum and Research Center.  The museum was located in an old two-story historic house and staffed by a friendly volunteer who welcomed us in to see the historic trees.

The Museum's website provided more detail:

"How did this get started?  In 1991, a friend jokingly gave Steven Jackson, local home designer, a tattered aluminum Christmas tree pilfered from a garbage heap. Remembering the silver tree in his childhood home, Jackson threw a party and invited guests to bring the "most aesthetically challenged" ornaments they could find. The gathering was a big hit.  A few years later, someone gave Steven a second tree unearthed at a yard sale and by 1998, Jackson owned seven. "It was just too many trees to fit in my house." Over the years, the Aluminum Tree & Aesthetically Challenged Seasonal Ornament Museum and Research Center snowballed as friends nabbed more trees from flea markets and dusty attics.  The current exhibit features over two dozen trees."

The trees did not have lights on them because of the electrical hazard of shorts, but instead were illuminated by a revolving circle of blue, red, yellow, and green glass in front of a spotlight.  I remembered that our next-door neighbor when growing up in Connecticut had such a tree and just such a light!  Our family - for whom the ritual of visiting a Christmas Tree farm and selecting a real tree, fresh with that fragrance of fresh balsam, and returning with it tied to the top of the car with twine, was an essential part of the Christmas season – thought their tree odd and futuristic, but beautiful in its own way.

These trees had been decorated in several styles by different non-profit organizations.  One of them, for example, bore pictures from the I Love Lucy TV show.  The actual instruction sheet for setting up an aluminum tree was displayed, stained from having spent many Christmases in a dusty attic, I would guess.

Around the corner, some whimsical person had made a display of Aluminum Christmas Tree seeds (aluminum beads) and instructions for growing your own tree from seed.

The Museum volunteer confided in us that one visitor had actually asked her what type of soil was best suited for growing these trees.

Also on display as part of the permanent exhibit was this television set from the 50s and a list of the shows that were being aired, such as Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, Gunsmoke, Perry Mason, and I Love Lucy.  Of course, we both remembered watching all of these shows, often fighting to see them through the snow on the screen, twisting rabbit ears and antennae to try to get a clear picture.

On the way out, we noticed a strange little piece of furniture on the porch which Martha thought looked like a pulpit or speaker’s podium.  But in a sudden flash of memory, I realized what it was, confirmed later in the day by this photo from Wikipedia.  It was a shoe-fitting fluoroscope, used in shoe stores from the 1920s until the 1970s.  Feet would be placed in the slot below, and an X-ray picture of wiggling skeletal toes inside a shoe could clearly be seen.  The fluoroscope was discontinued because of the growing knowledge about the danger of radiation.  But not before I, as a child, had viewed my very own wiggling toes on at least one occasion in the shoe department of Sears Roebuck in Hamden, Connecticut.  I am assuming the dosage of radiation did no permanent harm to this runner's feet.

We had time to drive the Reindeer Run course again to refresh our memory from last year - directional signs had already been placed at all the turns for tomorrow morning.  I had forgotten how many steep hills were in the first mile.  We agreed that it was at least as challenging a course as the Running of the Turkeys in Greensboro, perhaps more so.

Dinner was a huge salad and bowl of spaghetti with marinara sauce, each large enough for at least four runners, at Big Mike's in downtown Brevard.  If I ate here every night, my name might be preceded by the title "Big!"  Our humble motel for the night was the Sunset Motel, a small retro-style place on the outskirts of Town decorated in a style that would have fit right into the Heritage Museum, featuring lots of turquoise, pink, posters of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, and, yes, a good bit of aluminum.