A sign from the past helped Carmen Czachor turn in a new direction.
Everything looked fine in her life: The girl from Green Bay, Wis., had a degree in biology and a job in a lab. She was the manager of a wastewater treatment plant laboratory, in fact. With her expertise, she could have gone on to work for the Environmental Protection Agency or some such governmental body.
But then Czachor traveled to France and paid a visit to the house where the late doctor, philosopher and musician Albert Schweitzer had lived.
She saw the sign there that, loosely translated from the French, said: Make the most of your life.
Czachor, then 27, stopped in her tracks.
“I remember standing there, thinking, hmm. Is [lab work] what I really want to do with the rest of my life?”
She returned home. And Czachor — pronounced “zacker,” to rhyme with Packer, so her family are the Green Bay Czachors — thought back to what she had dreamed about as a youngster. There were three things: ballet, art and veterinary medicine.
“I was klutzy,” as a kid, she recalls.
And with the biology background, medicine seemed a better road than art.
She started down a long road toward a new profession, working for meager wages as a kennel helper at a clinic in a Chicago suburb. And she applied to eight veterinary schools.
Then came eight years at the University of Minnesota at St. Paul, where Czachor earned her doctorate in veterinary medicine. Upon graduation in 1995, she took an externship in Port Angeles, of all places, in local veterinarian Paul Weiseth’s clinic. After a year there, and after four years at the Angeles Clinic for Animals, Czachor made the leap toward her own place, the Family Veterinary Clinic, in January 2000, when she bought property at the intersection of Mahogany Lane and U.S. Highway 101.
Czachor had found her life’s work — and her life partner, a man who like her is a Midwesterner who fell for Port Angeles.
She met Andrew May at the Cock & Bull, a bar in Green Bay. And while Czachor keeps to her usual reserve, May doesn’t mind telling the whole story.
“I was there because they had over 190 beers from around the world,” he remembers; Czachor was there because her friend felt like going out.
‘Let’s get out of here’
May, now known as one of the more outgoing people in the city of Port Angeles, was highly sociable back then, too.
“We drank some beer, and then I said, ‘Let’s get out of here,’” he recalls.
They did, and then some. After that first meeting in August 1986, Czachor moved to Chicago to work in the veterinary clinic. Three months later, May knocked on her door and said something to the effect of “let’s stay together.” He got a job as a horticulturist at a swank resort, and proceeded to fly and drive over to St. Paul after she started vet school there.
They married in Green Bay on Aug. 26, 1995, the ninth anniversary of their first date.
May remembers well what attracted him to Czachor: “She is very much a smart cookie,” he says.
Czachor is not one to broadcast her accomplishments, though. Sometimes, May says, he has to do that. And if asked, Czachor will chat a bit about her many activities.
Besides belonging to several state and national professional associations, she is chairwoman of the Washington Veterinary Board of Governors, the judicial and legislative body that rules on changes in veterinary law and investigates complaints about practicing vets in the state.
At the Family Veterinary Clinic, Czachor supervises a staff that includes receptionists Terri DeBray and Beth Wilkerson, kennel manager Rick Leffler, full-time veterinary technician Bob Parr and part-time vet assistants Cassie Alderson, Lacey Langdon and Emily Breithaupt.
“Andrew is the gardener, of course,” she adds with a smile.
Lots of greenery
The clinic does have more than the typical display of flowers and trees — which makes sense, as May is the man who designs lavish holiday light displays around Port Angeles and Sequim, teaches horticulture at Peninsula College and writes the gardening column for the Peninsula Daily News.
He’s a tireless community booster, a member of the Port Angeles Business Association and the host of the community party known as the corn roast. For 14 years running on the first Sunday in August, May and Czachor have welcomed several hundred people to their house and yard for hundreds of ears of corn, plus a huge spread of other food and drink.
Czachor, meanwhile, loves to read and quilt. A seamstress since age 6, she also made the loud shirt May likes to wear to the corn roast.
Quilting appeals, Czachor says, because of its mathematical, puzzle-like quality — and “it will teach you patience,” she says.
Directed reading
Czachor has chosen a particular path for her reading. It stems from the time when her sons Spencer and Jackson were toddlers and she was at home with them more, feeling cut off from the world of ideas and intellectual exploration.
“We would go to a dinner party, and our friends would have these lofty conversations,” she remembers. “I had a 2-year-old and a 4-year-old.”
So, on a friend’s advice, she took the test for Mensa International, the high-IQ society.
“I passed,” Czachor says blithely. “I like taking tests.”
For her next project, she decided to read all the novels that have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The most delicious of these, for Czachor, were The Hours by Michael Cunningham and The Shipping News by Annie Proulx. But some, like John Updike’s Rabbit Is Rich, have been downright irritating. The Pulitzer panel places great emphasis on character development, so the winners tend to be thick with people’s thoughts, Czachor says. That can get to be too much.
So this reader is no longer rigid about finishing every book she starts.
“Life is too short,” says Czachor, so toss that book aside if it bugs you. At the same time, she recommends reading the Man Booker Prize winners, adding that those novels, such as Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, can satisfy more than the Pulitzer winners do.
Still time to read, quilt
These days, even with her veterinary practice and her active family — Spencer and Jackson are now 15 and 13, respectively — Czachor still has the time and energy for avid reading and quilting. While the obvious question is “How do you do it all?,” the answer is not so predictable.
“I take naps,”she says.
May can vouch for their effectiveness. His wife tells him to wake her in 20 minutes, and following that catnap, she is clearly refreshed.
Still, one wonders: How do this introvert and extrovert get along?
“I am at the far end of the bell curve, and she is at the other,” May says.
“Each of us says, independently, that what we do is pull each other toward the middle.”
Evidently it works. May and Czachor celebrated their 16th anniversary this year.
Love of travel
They do have some major commonalities, such as a shared love of travel. They went to Costa Rica a few years ago, and for Christmas they want to take the boys to Vancouver, B.C.
Just as important is the fact that May and Czachor love life in Port Angeles. May emphasizes how the community is a good place to bring up their sons, and is more peaceful than the larger cities where they have dealt with long commutes and higher crime rates.
Czachor, for her part, is as sure as ever about her choice of profession.
“Every day, there’s something different,” she says.
A client might burst into the examination room and put a sick snake on the table. The doctor has to get out her textbooks, Czachor says, like when someone brings in an ailing sugar glider.
“Essentially, vets are detectives,” who must use logic to ferret out the problem, she says.
Highly recommended
Veterinary medicine, for Czachor, is “really a lot of fun. I highly recommend it.”
Yet Czachor hopes to recalibrate her life a bit in the new year. At 47, she wants to find an associate to share clinic duties, so that she can spend more time being Mom to Spencer and Jackson. It won’t be long till they’re out of the house, she knows.
“I feel time treading on,” Czachor says. “I don’t want to regret not having gone to more soccer games.”
She’s still playing by the Schweitzer rule, after all: making the most of her time.
