Michelle L. Rusk's Blog, page 17

The Inspiration for "Route 66 Dreams"

We were a road trip family. My happiest memories were those trips in the family station wagon. Those were the memories we would reminisce about at Rascal’s, a restaurant we ate at on Christmas Eve in my hometown of Napervlle, IL. There was always some funny story or adventure to remember.

My dad took a trip on Route 66 with a friend in his convertible (he and his convertible are pictured above at a wedding- this one I believe before my parents knew each other) before my parents married. I don’t know that they went all the way to Los Angeles because I don’t remember conversations about LA. We do have photos and home movies he took of the hotels in Las Vegas, I believe where they must have gone instead before heading back to Chicago.

When my dad and I took the first trip to Albuquerque to sign me up for my graduate school classes and find an apartment to live, I remember how he turned the car off I-40 right when you drive into Albuquerque after the canyon, at Tramway. Central, as Route 66 is known here, is just a block away and we took it all the way through town. What I remember most are his comments that there were few motels left and instead mostly mobile home dealers.

We were a Holiday Inn family and it was a game that after we passed the billboard of our chosen location for that night, to see who could spot the familiar Holiday Inn sign.

These road trips laid the foundation for “Route 66 Dreams.” While we never drove west (most of our trips kept us east of the Mississippi), we did a lot of driving– there was always a new place to stay and a list of sites to peruse in each place we went. The Danielson family isn’t my family, Jana’s story isn’t mine beyond the dream of wanting to be a writer.

Instead, her story was born of me wondering how I found myself wanting to be a writer, of wondering what it might have been like if I’d had the same adventures she had, a father who was much more open than mine ever was. There are so many stories to tell and there are small pieces of me in this story (and things that I experienced) but mostly, it was about exploring something I had started to wonder…where are our dreams born?

For Jana, they were born on this trip and it’s this trip in her life that I’ve chosen to share with the backdrop of the nostalgic eighties (I do believe 1986 was the best year for music and maybe a reason I chose to center the book in that very year) and a family vacation.

A Reminder as Things Begin to Bloom Again

There is a myth, one I continue to hear thrown out there every December, that people are more likely to end their lives during the holiday season.

No no no. While depression might run more rampant during the holiday because of the disappointment with relationships, sadness over loss, or a variety of other reasons, digging into the numbers, one would see that more suicides happen in March than any other time of year.

March– when things start to bloom, when we get teased with warmer weather, when spring break usually takes place. Yes, that March. My tulips are beginning to sprout and this morning it felt much lighter than it has as I began my swim at 6:30.

For most of us, March is a time of hope and renewal; we begin to feel a surge of energy after the dark and cold of winter.

But for some people, including my sister who died 29 years ago this March, I quickly understood that while I saw hope in things blooming, for her it meant the pain of watching things bloom while her own pain felt inescapable.

Take a step back this month– many aspects of our lives are opening up (while we all step tentatively into them, afraid we might lose them again), but there is still much pain around us. That pain is exaggerated by the site of things turning green and then the first flowers beginning to bloom. As many people feel renewal from getting to switch out the winter coat to a spring one, many others can’t get there.

Check on your own mental wellness this month; make sure you’re doing okay. If you’re not, what can you do to help yourself? And check on those around you and whom you care about. Our pain doesn’t all look or feel the same. If something looks out of place to you, it probably is.

There is hope but sometimes people need a little help finding the color in the tulips and the lighter days.

The Olympics

I suppose it was just as well I was out of the room when they exintinguished the torch on the taped version of the closing ceremonies last night. My hope is that in two years, in time for the next games (summer), things will be different in a better way.

My sister Karen, Greg, and I all lamented how we weren’t excited for the Olympics a few weeks ago. I can’t speak for Greg, but for Karen and I, the games were a big deal in our family. I can recall all of us gathered in front of the tv to watch bobsled and figure skating in 1980 at Lake Placid and then track in the summer of 1984 in Los Angeles.

For the past year or so, I’ve been spending more time tracing back in my life where my dreams were born and what inspires me. In a major way, it has been the Olympics. It’s where my unfulfilled running dreams were born, but those dreams taught me about goal setting, dreaming big, working hard, and the idea that we can achieve something we set out to do (although my case it was a long list of things outside of running competitively, but I don’t believe I would have accomplished any of it without dreaming about winning that goal medal in track).

Denise and I watched a lot of Olympics together and in the late 1980s when Mom worked for Midway Airlines, she took us to Colorado Springs to see the United States Olympic Training Center, a place I would spend the summer working as an intern at USA Boxing the summer of 1993, just months after Denise’ suicide.

That summer put me in the thick of our athletes, especially in the cafeteria where we all ate (Bonnie Blair sat behind me one day). I worked the 1996 Atlanta summer games and in 2002, I carried the torch here in Albuquerque as the flame made its way to Salt Lake City.

The Olympic games are a part of the fabric that I continue to weave and call my life. I am saddened by a whole slew of things that have happened, of knowing how many people aren’t excited by them (we found ourselves getting more into them as the eighteen days wore on), and I hope that the changes that need to be made can be made to make them stronger and change them as our society has changed much in recently years. We are in a reckoning with so much and the Olympics are no exception.

Probably what saddened me the most though, was the comment in an article about how much NBC paid for the games, saying how they one had been something that brought us together. That wasn’t the case at all this year, like so many other things.

Still, I hope that in 2024, the rings that have been separated will be glued together stronger than ever. After all, how many other dreams were born through the Olympics besides mine? I hate to imagine life without something that has made such a difference for so many of us.

February Video

Meet my February video! Some fun things and how I tie everything I do together into Chelle Summer.

Breaking the Loop

The loop. We all have at least one– maybe more than one, maybe more than we want to count. The loops that repeat in our heads over and over about how we feel about ourselves, about something we regret we did or said, how we think others see us. They can be endless while sending us into a downward spiral that paralyzes us.

Yes, those loops.

Those are the kind of loops that are meant to be broken. They don’t do us any good so why do we hang onto them other than we’re just so accustomed to them that they are a habit, the kind of habit that needs to be broken.

It takes a little work– I won’t deny it, I’ve spent years cutting my loops and throwing them in the Wednesday trash pick up. But once you learn how to break the loops, you become more aware of them and can stop them before they paralyze you.

The key is finding a way that works for you to stop them so you can break them. In fact, the universe might be trying to break them for you and you just don’t realize it (that phone call or text message that comes through while you’re looping? It’s probably there to help get you out of your head).

For me, I’ve learned to distract myself from the loop. The loop is negative and I know it, but I also know how hard it is to stop myself from the negative fearful thinking that ruled so much of my life. If I’m looping. I force myself to think of something happy and that means switching my mind to thinking about whatever writing project I’m working on or something that I’m sewing. Maybe even a drawing/painting that I’m not quite sure how to get onto paper.

This happened recently– I caught myself in the loop and then moved my thinking to what I was going to write the next day in the latest novel I’m writing. What would happen next in the story? What pieces was I missing? Where was I stuck that I need help to change or make happen?

I found that I instantly felt better and the loop had been thrown in the trash. Sure, the loops keeps trying to come back, pesky things that they are, but I keep breaking them. And the best part? It’s actually forcing me to spend more of my mind and time being creative. I've come to realize how much time I’ve wasted thinking about things that don’t deserve the loop.

Questions...and then answers

Maybe I’ve been lucky. It seems I’ve been asking the question of who I am and trying new things for most of my life. However, maybe it’s more than luck, maybe it happened so I could share it with others and help them to move forward, too.

Somewhere in the boxes of things from my childhood, there is one of those diaries that has a lock on it, a gift for a birthday somewhere along the line. I know around fifth grade I asked who I was in my diary, already seeing how I reflected to be different things to different people. In sixth grade, I began journaling steadily, a task i continued to do for the bulk of my years (although there are several years at one point).

To go back and read those journals, what I find is a girl trying to find herself, knowing she was bound for bigger things, and despite the challenge and nervousness of trying new things, doing them anyway. My younger sister’s suicide when I was 21 didn’t stop me, it just made me reflect even more on what was most important to me. After all, just months after her death, I found myself bound a summer internship at USA Boxing at the United State Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. Life didn’t stop because she had ended her life; there was even more to do.

I got where I am because I have kept asking the questions, continued to explore opportunities in life, even ones I wasn’t sure about but I could at least say I did try (believe me, my flute-playing skills should be long forgotten).

It’s a long road and it’s one, much like prayer, that doesn’t always have the answers. But as I dragged myself out of bed in the cold this morning to run and then go swim, feeling like weekend was short, the week ahead feeling long, I am reminded that sometimes life is like that.

Continuing to trudge forward is well worth it though. At some point we reach points of rest, points of fun, and we can take a peek back and see, yes, I know who I am because I walked this road.

Start asking. Write it down. Throw it out there in prayer– when you’re washing dishes, working out, driving. The answers might not come right away but the universe is waiting for you to ask and take off from the starting line. You’ll move forward. You might not see it at first, but it’ll happen. Stay open and let it emerge.

Knowing Myself

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I’m sure it’s no surprise that that’s me in the photo above. My mom hung this photo in our hall– she had every reason to be proud of it, not because I was in it but because of sunshine she caught bouncing off the water. And the bright colors I’m wearing. That’s me, still today.

When I look at this photo I’m reminded how well I know myself. And how important that is for continuing to forge forward in my life- and navigate all the challenges that come with forging forward.

I don’t like the pandemic. In fact, I hate the pandemic for a lot of reasons as we all do. But I still believe that we’ve been given an opportunity to make positive changes in our lives. The hard part is many people aren’t sure how to do that, especially where to start.

So let me help you.

Start asking yourself questions– Who am I? What do I want from life?

You might not have answers to either of these right away and that’s okay. Remember, sustainable change, the kind that lasts, doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a long, slow road. But it’s worth to stay on it.

Ask those questions as you’re driving, cutting vegetables for dinner. Write them down in a notebook and then jot down answers as they come. You don’t need to write in sentences and things might not make sense right now. That’s okay!

First you need to throw it out to the universe so the universe can throw the responses back to you.

And listen.

You never know where the answers might come from, but the more you ask and the more you work at listening, you’ll find they are right there in front of you waiting for you to acknowledge them.

The January Video: Inspiration for a New Year

St. Dwynwen's Day

January 25 is St. Dwynwen’s Day. She is the Welsh patron saint of lovers and in our house, this is our Valentine’s Day.

I’m not sure how my interest in her began except that I remember flipping through a book, Britain’s Holiest Places, at Wendy’s cottage in the Welsh countryside and somehow I became interested in St. Dwynwen’s site on the sea.

I knew I wanted go to there, but it wasn’t until I was trying to finish my book That Cooking Girl that I knew I needed to go there to finish writing the novel.

The book centers around Megan, a Welsh name that John Peters, the man I called my “UK Dad’ and who died just a few weeks after my mom, thought I should build a character and story around. While my story about Megan isn't quite what I know he had in mind, I did incorporate so much that he shared with me, especially adding the “Mzee,” the wise uncle he called himself. It’s a Swahili term he learned from the years he and his family lived in Kenya.

It was important to John on my visits to the UK that he and his wife Jean show me Wales. He wanted me to see the “other” part of the UK that he felt Americans too often overlooked. On my next visit there, which fell during my one-year wedding anniversary with Greg, Wendy (who had never been to St. Dwynwen’s site) and Nigel took us there.

It’s important to note that you can only visit when the tide is out otherwise you need a boat (good luck swimming since it never really gets warm there!) to get to the little piece of land where she lived.

That visit allowed me to finish the book because I had the final piece I needed for it. And each year since then, we have celebrated St. Dwynwen and her day in our house. Maybe one day I’ll understand why I was drawn there, but I’m not sure it matters. The reality is that I felt a need to go, I was able to do it and had people who wanted to experience with me, and I finished my fourth novel because of it.

I’m sure John is nodding approvingly.

When doors close so new ones can open

I have always been grateful that Sam and Lois never batted an eye about keeping my surfboard in their garage. It was one of the biggest reasons I was able to get the board since I don’t live in the LA area. But I also knew the day would come when I would have take the surfboard out of the garage for the last time, not to be returned once it was placed in my car.

As I write this, they are moving to assisted living next week in San Diego. We were able to see them for a short time on New Year’s Eve and retrieve the boards (we gave Greg’s board to our friend Greg who was excited to be the recipient of it as he hopes to learn to surf soon). No matter how much time we have with people, it never feels like enough and it’s hard to believe that nearly ten years have gone by since the board was made for me.

I have written about how I currently can’t ride it because my shoulder pops out and I’m not sure when I’ll have surgery to repair (besides also not being convinced that surgery will actually keep it in place). But we continued to take it down to the beach on many of our trips and used it in Chelle Summer photos. I also hoped for a very flat ocean day because I knew I could at least get out on the water with it and listen to the calm water lap against the balsa wood of the board.

Instead, we’ve made the board part of our home decor, resting it against a wall in our living room, and some people have said it looks like it belongs (exactly how I pictured it in my mind). We’ll use it for Chelle Summer photos, after all, it is part of my logo, and one day it will return to LA and the ocean.

However, the board is just a metaphor for a big change not just for me but for Greg, too. For more than ten years I stayed with Sam and Lois (adding Greg to the mix seven years ago) and it was like our “other” home. I call them my California parents and appreciated how much we felt not just welcomed but allowed to become in some way part of the fabric of their home and their lives in Palos Verdes.

Several months ago, my mom’s candy thermometer broke when I was making prickly pear candy. Quite honestly, I freaked out, thinking my world would end, that my hard candy wouldn’t be the same. But after trying the second new thermometer, the candy came out better than before. I felt as if I’d been kicked a reminder– sometimes you’re asked to give up something for something better.

I don’t want to say that anything could be better than the fun and times we had with Sam and Lois. I am experiencing a grief I can’t talk much about right now. There’s so much to this and they and their house– and the surfboard– are a huge part of who I am today.

Yet I also know that sometimes you must close doors to open new ones, bigger ones. The hardest part is trusting as you stand between those two doors waiting for it to happen. That’s where I am now.