Anne and Laverne Arthur have been married for thirty-five years and have raised five children. Laverne became a family physician in his fifties.  Anne is finishing a PhD.

BURNHAM MANSION IN PETERBOROUGH . . . 7:00 p.m.

Burnham’s Original Famous Spinach and Artichoke Dip.  Burnham Mansion Chef’s Special for Two for Anne and Laverne. Linguine Pomodoro Pesto for me.

THE CONVERSATION

Anne and Laverne Arthur know what it means to sell the farm. Their bold choices give them a credibility few have when they ask people to see beyond the present. Though neither grew up in families that emphasized education, their own family currently contains two medical doctors, two PhD candidates and an application to a PhD program pending.

Laverne now practices in Lakefield as a family physician. Most of his patients are people over forty. He says, “I’m interested in the second half of the life span and particularly the elderly, except they have a lot going on and they’re slow moving and they don’t always have their stories ready. It takes time.”

Anne explains that Laverne “likes the challenging ones.” The same could be said of her.  She currently teaches young people who are being treated for mental illness and is completing on a PhD in character education. She does some work in Laverne’s office and remembers an eighty five year old who had not had a physician for seven years. This patient arrived with a suitcase full of prescription drugs picked up through visits to walk in clinics.

Laverne is quick to point out that they are not the stereotypical Doctor and Missus of years gone by. He talks about Anne’s upbringing in a very large family that kicked her out of the home at sixteen when she was ex-communicated from the family church.  When they made overtures to reconnect with the family at the time of their marriage, Laverne conceded to asking Anne’s father for her hand even though he had reservations about such a patriarchal tradition.  He remembers being told that you don’t always get what you want so it would have to be okay.

Anne found similar challenge gaining acceptance into the farm community Laverne grew up in. She says, “It was hard for me being on the farm. When you’re a city person, your heart is not in it. You’re always an outsider.”

Laverne points out that they had both been raised on an ethic of hard work.  He started farming because he was not sure what else there was to do. When he decided he wanted to study agriculture at the University of Guelph, he realized, “there’s so much to the world that I hadn’t any idea of.”  His family could not understand his decision and everyone, including himself, was surprised by his success.

Anne had been educating herself at home and their family was growing. Four of their five children were born in the first six years of their marriage.  Anne remembers, “We read books about parenting even though we were really young. I was a high school drop out. We really wanted to get it right.”

Laverne remembers there came a time when they realized that they needed to sell the farm to pursue their educations. They felt it was doable even though many others did not. Laverne says, “Even when we sold the farm, it took so many years to liquidate. Maybe it was that step that made us think we could do anything.  We were just brash enough.”

Anne had their fifth and final child while they were both students at the University of Waterloo. They joke about passing him off in the hallways between the classes they carefully scheduled to eliminate the need for a babysitter. She says, “I think the most powerful thing for [our children] is they saw us in university. We sold the farm and went to university. That’s the strongest statement you can make. It seemed very natural to them. They were on campus with us.”

Laverne and Anne have both worked as English teachers with Anne acting as Laverne’s department head, a reversal of gender roles that unnerved their school superintendent at the time.  Anne says, “We’d always been out of synch. We were always sort of not doing what other people were doing. It kind of became a way of life. People weren’t shocked by it. “ She could be talking about many of the decisions they have made, but Laverne’s stint at medical school may have raised the most eyebrows.

Anne recalls offering to read to Laverne while he drove, something they had frequently done in the past. They quickly realized that the language was too inaccessible for their arrangement to work on medical textbooks.

Laverne knows that this is reflective of the specialized language.  He says, “We’re not used to talking about illness and we don’t have a language for it. Doctors have developed their own language for it and it’s not necessarily that accessible.”

Anne, and anyone who watches the television show Medical Students, knows the scientific language was not particularly accessible to Laverne himself. Laverne enrolled in Medical School at the age of forty nine and at the insistence of their eldest child. She herself was studying medicine and thought that Laverne’s detailed questions about the work she was doing showed a real aptitude for medicine.

Laverne has admitted on camera that it was an extra challenge to study medicine without a background in science. In a clip from the show Medical Students, his class is shown receiving a lesson about vectors. He remembers turning to the camera and saying, “I wish my son Wesley was here. He’s a physics major and he could tell me what a vector is.”

Anne notes that at the time Laverne was studying medicine, they also had five children in university. They were living on her teacher’s salary, but are more interested in talking about the learning than the finances. She reminds Laverne of an analogy he likes to use, likening medical school to swimming across a lake.

Laverne says, “Sometimes you’re feeling good and you think you’re going to swim across the lake. Then you get half way and you can’t turn back. All you can do is keep swimming and hope you don’t drown. When you get to the other side you think that wasn’t so bad, but there was a moment.”

Anne laughs that it was more than a moment. “It was about six months.”

Laverne and Anne are celebrating their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary and apply the same analogy of swimming across the lake to succeeding in marriage. They are clearly committed to their marriage and their family. Though the time may be past when every member of their family had a university student card, they are anticipating their first grandchild.

Anne explains the importance of a marriage as time passes. She is not talking to me, but to Laverne. She says, “When your parents die, they have known you all of your life. When they start to pass away, I look at you and I think you’ve know me all this time and that has value.”

Laverne agrees, “You can’t replace that history. You don’t take that time and replace it.” They are not so much looking back as they are looking at each other. And neither can look away.

STILL DIGESTING

Anne and Laverne might seem paradoxical to some. They have made changes in their lives that few dream of and they have made those changes while raising a very strong family. Not everyone would expect people who seem so comfortable with change to still be so comfortable with each other after thirty five years of marriage.

There in may lie the success of their marriage.  They do not expect that things will stay the same forever. That is by no means the same thing as believing that things don’t last forever. For a marriage to last, it must change, with the times, with the people in it and with the circumstances they find themselves in.

Though Laverne and Anne have moved homes and jobs many times, they are grounded in a belief that they can do what they set out to do. That determination is surely as important in a marriage as it is completing an education and doing meaningful work.

Anne and Laverne do no hesitate to make change when they need to.  But neither makes these changes as a way out; they make these changes as a way in. They hope never to retire from working and speak of their development in a way that makes me certain the best is yet to come.

They have a remarkable ability to look beyond the present to see where they are headed and as a result they have gone much farther than most. Their ability to change their careers and their home while staying in their marriage are actually evidence of the same principal.

You make what you have the very best you can.