Love at first sight struck again for Arthur Arens when he met his second wife, Theresa Webber, at the Portsmouth Senior Center on a late fall day in 2001. He saw her from across the room, and he knew. It was in the way she walked, he says. He was 87 at the time. Two days later, the first time they spoke, he said, “I’m going to marry you.” Three weeks later, they were wed.

Sounds easy enough. 

“He was already a cowboy when I met him,” says Terry, who is of a meticulously undisclosed age but clearly gaining on him, spry as she is.

He sported a velvet cowboy hat, and she asked him, “Are you from Texas?”

“No,” he responded, “I’m from New Jersey.”

He just likes the idea of a Western feeling. “Something different,” he says from his hospital bed in a recent conversation. They got married, he took her shopping, and the rest, my friends, is fashion, love, and all that love endures.

You may have seen them at the Friendly Toast, walking downtown, driving in his red Lincoln through the streets, at the Fox Run Mall. For four years now, the sight of Artie and Terry together has been as much a signature of Portsmouth as kids playing Hacky Sack in Market Square. Artie is a tall and lanky real estate success who, even with a cane, walks with a strong, sure gait. He wears leather slacks and bolo ties, is always topped with a cowboy hat and, more often than not, has his arm around Terry or her hand in his. Terry is tiny, delicate-looking, very well put-together and always red lipsticked, wearing long leather skirts, rhinestones and spangles to boot.

“I’ll never forget the first time they came to my door,” says one of Terry’s three children, Melveen Anthony, of Portsmouth. “They both were in cowboy outfits—and my mother has always been sort of a conservative, low-key dresser.” Yet there were Artie and Terry in hats, long leather coats, the full garb. “Is this normal?” she thought. “Who do I talk to about this?!” 

“It took me a while,” she admits, adding that sometimes going out with the two of them can feel like being in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. “And meanwhile, they’re waving!” she says. But she loves it. “They’re legends,” she explains. “They have some sort of following.”

“He loves good times,” Terry says, “and he loves people, and everywhere we go, he doesn’t know people in the restaurant, and he’ll stop and talk to people. I say, ‘You don’t know them, you’re interrupting their meals!’ And he says, ‘That’s alright,’ New York style, happy-go-lucky, you know. And he talks to everybody, meets people, (and) the next time they say they know us already so he goes and talks to them. He is something, very different, very different person. I’m more shy. But he isn’t! When he’s up and about, boy,” she shakes her head, gesturing toward the bed where he sleeps.

Artie is a widower and Terry is twice widowed herself, so they knew what they were getting into when they were married in the Activities Room at the Portsmouth Senior Center, housed in a sunny, plant-filled old building next to the district courthouse on Parrot Ave.

In addition to family members, all the seniors from the center were invited to the wedding, for which Artie’s son Bob and his friend provided live music. Terry wore a gold lamé dress and a wreath of flowers on her head, and Artie sported a cowboy suit, of course. It wasn’t until Melveen was escorting in her mother that she noticed the pink shoes. “What’s up with the shoes?” she asked. They clearly didn’t match, but Terry informed her that Artie had bought them and wanted her to wear them. “Well, if that’s what you want to wear, then OK,” Melveen responded. “That’s the way she is,” she explains, “and if he likes something, she would wear them.”

“I think Terry and Arthur getting married, at the late ages that they did, that was a huge statement,” says Brandy Irish, who came on as activities director at the Portsmouth Senior Center about six months ago. Brandy, just entering her middle years, is a spitfire in heels, with a take-me-seriously Boston accent and great hair. “Why?” she asks, “What’s the point? … Especially when you consider, they’ve been down that road before. So they know,” she laughs—because, once divorced and once widowed, she does, too—“about the potholes and everything else.”

But, she continues, “I think it was a very positive thing. … It really made everybody feel like this really is a family. And they as a married couple in this center, almost made it their mission on a daily basis to be here. They were here on a daily basis, and they sort of took on this parental position. You know? And it’s kind of funny,” she laughs again, because Artie and Terry are actually younger than some of the other seniors who frequent the center. “They’re sort of the Mom & Pop of the setting here. I miss having them here, I really do,” she says. “They definitely have been a piece of what’s going on here.”

And there is a lot going on there.
“It’s a constant spark. Everybody wants romance, and especially this age group, because they have a tendency to be—kinda lonely,” Brandy explains. “If you are a single male, and you come into this building, you’re definitely going to find a sweetheart. You might find several sweethearts. And guess what? They don’t mind sharing. You know, they’re all past that ‘it’s mine’ type of thing.” She goes on to say that Arthur is the only man who’s not been “up for grabs,” because of the marriage.

But, she explains, it’s not all just about boy-girl romance. “Beyond boys and girls, the definition of the word ‘romance’ is more of a community type of thing…. Everybody takes care of each other. You come here, you’ll see women dancing with women. Romance is a community thing. There’s a lotta love in this building.”

A lot of love, plenty of music, and some serious dancing.

Late last summer, Brandy captured many of their activities on a homemade video, which starts off showing an outdoor harvest party with music, dancing, a donut-eating contest (with the donuts hanging by strings from tree limbs, it’s not as easy as it sounds) and bobbing for apples (“Don’t anybody drop your teeth in there!” Brandy can be heard yelling). There’s a lunch-time fashion show with more music, more dancing and a full audience—and not just of seniors. And then there is the casual sing-along turned raucous entertainment hour, when the seniors are visited by a group of mentally ill adults and their caretakers.

Brandy started formalizing the Friday sing-alongs in an effort to turn it into a little something more, and she asked Terry to help her lead it last summer. In person or on tape, you wouldn’t guess that Terry had ever been shy, as she says she was when she came to the center. She started coming out of her shell even before she met Artie, she says, but clearly he has rubbed off on her, too. Every week, she starts off the show by leading the room to sing “God Bless America,” and she continues to dance and wave small American flags the whole hour, holding hands with just about everyone at some point and gently pulling people to the dance floor.

With Terry as a ring leader and Brandy as emcee, the entertainment hour kicks into gear pretty quickly. In the video, Brandy can be seen playing an electric piano, tap dancing and rousing the roomful of seniors onto the dance floor while Arthur, seated behind a microphone, either sings or hums along to everything from “Love Me Tender” to a jazzy Latin instrumental to “Chicken Dance.” It’s hard to believe that a different activities group had filled the room and practiced the silent dance of tai chi only an hour before.

“That place is rockin’,” describes Deb Murray, who attended the fashion show. Deb is a waitress at the Friendly Toast, a few blocks away on Congress Street and a rockin’ place in its own right, where both Artie and Terry used to dine separately before they met. 

“Artie would sit in the middle yellow table right in front of the window, and she’d sit at the littler table just to the right,” observes Kristin Goss, another waitress at the Toast. 

The staff referred to Artie as the “pie guy” because he would always order decaf coffee and cold apple pie.  Terry’s nickname: “The mod lady,” because, cowgirl or no, she’s always been a dresser … and never orders the same thing. 

“They’re both characters, and to see them get together … it was pretty cool to witness,” says Kristin, who Deb describes as having “big love” for the couple.  “Who doesn’t that knows them?” Kristin responds.

“It’s been wonderful being involved in both their lives,” she says.  “It’s nice when older people aren’t so judgmental. And, because of that, they’ve just enriched the quality of everyone’s life around them.”

“I love the help in there, a lot of young people,” Terry says of the abundantly pierced and tattooed waitstaff at the restaurant. They come to her booth, scoot her over in the seat and chat. “And we have fun!” Terry says.

“They take into their hearts all types of people. There’s just no rationality to their friendships. My mom has gone the distance, and so has Artie. They seem to revel in that camaraderie with all kinds of people,” Melveen says. “They just give the word ‘old’ a whole new meaning.”

Terry still visits her friends at the Toast every morning, but these days she only really dresses up on Fridays for entertainment hour, the single part of the week that she attends the Senior Center.

Artie’s room at the Portsmouth Regional Hospital is dim with the lights off, and affords ample view of two brick walls with a patch of landscaped earth in between. Artie wears a hospital johnny and white blankets up to his chin. A young nurse enters to take his blood, an event that is apparently old hat by now. “They come and take my blood,” he says, “and they say, ‘Oh, your blood is low!’ Of course it is, with them coming to take it all the time!” His red-rimmed eyes may be old, but they’re lucid.

It all started with two toes. He says their circulation needed improving, but, looking back, he should have just cut them off. It’s been never-ending ever since. At 91, this is his first hospitalization.

“What a mess I’ve gotten myself into,” he says. The doctor says that he’ll walk out in three weeks, but amputating his leg is still a possibility. “You’re supposed to believe what the doctor tells you, aren’t you?” he asks, and moments later drifts in and out of sleep. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Am I going to die in here, or walk out of here in three weeks?”

Before meeting Terry, Artie was a widower after 62 years of marriage to “Ruthie,” as he calls his first wife. He was 21, they had talked by a river for 20 minutes, and he was in love. They married a month later. He knew, he says, “And I was right.” Right then, and right again with Terry. “She’s a good woman,” he says.

“He’s a wonderful guy,” Terry says later, from a chair next to his bed. It’s Friday and she’s come straight from the Senior Center for her daily visit, still dressed in shades of purple, a leopard print jacket, a black cowgirl hat lined with rhinestones, and wristsful of jewelry. “I wish I could help him,” she says, “but I can’t.”

After losing two husbands, Terry never thought she’d marry again. “I had too much, enough of it, you know,” she explains. “I mean too much, being sick you know. It breaks my heart to see them like that, like now.” But at the Senior Center, he was so nice to her, she says, “overwhelmed” by her. “Of all the seniors there, he said that he thought he liked me the best, so …” Of all her husbands, all good men, she says, this one is the nicest.

“I don’t really understand why he’s there so long,” confesses Melveen. She’s worried about Artie’s health, both physical and mental. “It’s also deteriorating my mother,” she adds. “She’s not eating, and she’s happy, but she’s not herself. She’s been there for over 90 days, and stays more than five hours a day. I kind of worry, and I don’t want to see her depressed.”

Barely 100 pounds to begin with, Terry says she’s lost about five pounds “somehow.” She worries too much, she acknowledges. “He’s here too long,” her voice gets quiet, “and I don’t know how much longer.”

“It’s a day to day thing with them, as far as his health goes,” Melveen says. “Take it one day at a time, especially when you’re that age.”

Terry stands from her chair by the hospital bed and pulls four small American flags affixed to dowels out of a plastic bag.

“She’ll put the whole show on now,” Artie musters from the bed.

She crosses two flags in each hand and, door open, he hums along as she sings what words she remembers from the “U.S. Marine Corps Hymn,” waving the flags slowly in the air. Artie is frustrated to not remember the words, but he’s propped himself up in the bed and watches his wife. There is a glimmer in those red-rimmed eyes as she finishes the song. Then, out come the tambourines, and they light up. At the foot of the bed, Terry dances lightly to no particular song, a tambourine in each hand, one shaking in the air and the other tapping against her hip, which is cocked to the side in an impressively sassy manner. Her eyes are on him, and a smirk emerges from the side of her mouth. From his blanketed station, he takes her in fully.

Both Artie and Terry freely admit that they don’t like the idea of being alone. But more than a remedy to that, being married gave them something to look forward to, according to Melveen.

“We always discuss things,” Melveen remembers, “and she just showed up and said, ‘I’m getting married.’ She was high on life, all giddy, they were both laughing all the time together. … Some people think it’s really stupid, because they have such a short time,” she says. But she thinks it actually helps them both to live longer. “She changed,” Melveen says. “She got younger, more vibrant, more outgoing.”

“When she met Artie,” Melveen goes on, “it was the highlight of her life.” He likes to dance and sing, as she points out, and, as Terry will tell you, he didn’t just want to go home and watch TV after their visits to the Senior Center. They would go to the mall, to the Friendly Toast, to Wilson’s in Maine, where they purchase their leather. He buys her jewelry, calls her “little darling,” writes her love notes … “All these things,” Melveen says, “that a woman that age wouldn’t ever expect to come her way.”

Witnessing her mother’s transition and her willingness to love has had great significance for Melveen, now a single mother after her husband’s death at a young age. “You can still pick up the pieces,” she has seen, “and have that … romantic relationship with someone no matter what age you are.”

“Between her and Artie,” Melveen says, “they really do reflect the whole changing of time. That people can be 90 and be in love, that there are no generation gaps, that you can really take into your heart all kinds of people. That’s really what keeps them going.”

“There will never be two like them again,” Brandy says. “I can guarantee you that.”