James L. Rubart – Real life Romance – Part 1 of 2

Shannon here: Best-selling B & H author, James L. Rubart shares his real life romance and a chance to win his latest release, Book of Days. Comment on any post dated Jan 10 – 14 for a chance to win. Deadline: Jan 15, midnight Central time. Here’s James:

My wife and I lived an hour and a half apart the entire time we dated.  I was in the Seattle area, she was an hour and a half north in Bellingham.  Dates meant an hour and a half drive each way.
During the summer of ’85 I worked at an announcer at Spirit 105.3 radio. On Friday nights I would start at 11 pm, work till 6am Saturday morning, then jump in my ’74 Super Beetle and head north. Hey, when you’re 22 years old and madly in love, you don’t need sleep!  One Saturday Darci said she had a special day planned. I asked if I needed nice clothes. She said no.
I arrived at her and her housemate’s place around 8:30, we went to Flintstone Land up in Canada, where Darci had arranged for Wilma to pick me out of the crowd and have a dance with me—it was great fun.
When we got back to her place, I crashed for three hours till Darci woke me to go to dinner. I stirred, stared at her through my half opened eyes, and thought I saw her wearing a stunning red dress.
 “You should probably get up, we need to get going to be to dinner on time.”
“You look gorgeous.”
“Thank you.”
“Why are you wearing that?” I blinked.
“For dinner.”
“What? I don’t have nice clothes with me, I thought you told me I didn’t have to bring nice clothes.”
“Yeah, that’s a problem, but don’t worry, we’ll figure something out.”
We got in my car and she guided me to a friend’s house. “Let’s see if they have anything we can borrow.”
When got to the house, her friend opened up the door and said, “Well, we don’t have much, but I have this nice dress shoe. Do you want that?”
The next house we went to had the matching shoe. The next had tuxedo pants. The next a shirt, the next a jacket. The next had the bow tie. By the time we were done I was looking fine, dressed in a complete gray tuxedo
Then we drove to a rose garden where a table was set up in the middle of a gazebo. We sat and mutual friends of ours brought a five course meal to us. They even played a song for us using Whoopee Cushions as the instruments. No, that part wasn’t tremendously romantic. But it sure was funny.
When we got back to her place she had music picked out for us to dance to and then we finished the evening with a delectable dessert.
Twenty four years later I’m still madly in love with her. And probably why I have a strong romantic theme in both of my first two novels. Hey, what can I say? I have an amazing wife.
About James: James L. Rubart is the bestselling author of ROOMS (April 2010) and BOOK OF DAYS (January 2011). He’s the owner of Barefoot Marketing and Darci and he live in the Seattle area with their two outstanding teenage sons. You can catch up with him at www.jimrubart.com and on FB: James L Rubart and Twitter: @jimrubart
Come back Jan 12 for Jame’s proposal story and more about his books.