A small back page article in our local newspaper took me back 20 years.
It was 1989, I was newly wed and newly moved from a small town in Utah to the San Francisco bay area. My husband and I rode the train into the city together every morning. Him for school, me for work. He usually finished before me so I often rode the train home alone. This was the case one evening when, while underground, the train swayed and came to a stop. The Giant's were playing and the passengers joked that the crowd must have been doing the wave a little too vigorously. The mood was light until the conductor announced that an earthquake had hit. Over an hour passed before we evacuated the train and I could get to a phone. My husband sounded relieved when I called, he said he had been sitting by the phone waiting for my call.
The train was shut down, the Oakland bay bridge had been severely damaged, hotels were filling up and I did not know my way around the area. My husband told me he was coming to get me but he did not know how long it would take. I joined a group of people sitting on the steps of Macy’s. Five hours later, after crossing the San Rafael, the San Mateo and the Golden Gate bridges, passing through inspection points and crawling through traffic, my husband pulled up to Macy’s. Two women asked if they could ride back with us and find a ride to their homes from ours. Of course they could come, but why, my husband asked, should someone come get them when he could just take them home. After another five hour drive – ten hours total for my husband – we pull into our drive. I was so grateful for my husband and to be home – and then I saw a chair placed facing the phone. My husband said, “I told you I was waiting for you to call.” That, to me, is romance.
(Above is where I would choose to end my story - accuracy may require an addendum. I told my husband what I wrote, he says that although he would have driven 10 hours and over 3 bridges he thinks it might have been a few less hours and 2 bridges. Is my memory magnifying? Is his memory minimizing? In it's own way - this too is romance.)