IF YOU GO
Dudley Clendinen will read from A Place Called Canterbury at 7 p.m. Monday at Books and Books, 265 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables. 305-442-4408.Dudley Clendinen was writing editorials for The New York Times in 1994, commuting from Baltimore, when his mother finally agreed to sell her house in Tampa and move to an assisted living high-rise overlooking Tampa Bay.
From that year on, life changed for both him and her.
He made the trip to Tampa so often that he stayed in a spare bedroom in the high-rise for more than a year, off and on, and used his reporter's sensibilities to record the pulse of the place that teemed with life.
The result is A Place Called Canterbury, Tales of the New Old Age in America (Viking, $24.95), an often funny, sometimes terrifying account of the lives of people waiting to die.
As baby boomers with aging parents are discovering, an assisted living facility is a world unto itself, with occupants doing their best to put the best face forward. This is Clendinen's take on the cocktail hour: ``Dressed for dinner, sitting over cocktails with dyed and puffed and purchased hair, tucked faces, lasered eyes, titanium hips and knees and propped-open arteries whooshing with miracle drugs, they flashed porcelain and acrylic smiles across the room. . . . Like Mother, some of them looked just wonderful.''
Some of them include the tart-tongued Emily Maas Winston Moody, whose grandfather had started Maas Brothers department store in Tampa. She was Clendinen's godmother; he called her Emyfish from childhood. She refused to tell her age but she commented succinctly on the events of the moment. ''Organ recitals'' is what she called conversations among old people about their operations.
Wilbur and Mary Davis were the parents of one of Clendinen's classmates, Nathalie. They live in room 501 next to Emyfish and her husband Ashby. Over the course of time, Wilbur went from forgetting where his car was parked to forgetting Mary. He announced to Clendinen one night in the lobby that he was 1,000 years old but still got sexually aroused.
Sarah Jane Rubio was married to Mauricio, a psychiatrist who exercised by walking around the perimeter of the parking lot in the mornings, swinging his arms. Sarah Jane insisted on Grape-Nuts on her frozen yogurt at night despite kitchen rules that the cereal should be served only for breakfast. She also decided that since her friends had face-lifts, she'd have a brain-lift, ``And then maybe Ah'll be able to remembah somethin.'''.
Rabbi Karl and Ruth Richter had escaped from Germany after the Nazis dynamited his temple in 1939; Martha Cameron had been an Army nurse at the Battle of the Bulge, and Charles Sweet died long before his wife Martha, but a second bedroom in Martha's apartment was turned over to Clendinen, who fondly called her Sweetso.
All of these characters swirl around, or at least manage to keep moving around, Clendinen's mother. She had a series of strokes beginning a few years after moving to Canterbury, and she verges on death often enough that her son seemed to think she would always be there.
''Mother was, to begin with, idealistic, extraordinarily loving to the point of being suffocating, controlling, and an infinitely charming woman,'' Clendinen said in a telephone interview. 'She was used to running things, being in charge of my parents' private and social lives, managing and brokering my life when I lived at home.''
His shrink dubbed her Margaret Thatcher.
DAD'S DEATH
Clendinen's father had been editor of The Tampa Tribune for 25 years and then chairman of the editorial board. He died in 1991. But it took three years for Clendinen to dislodge his arthritic and mentally slipping mother from her house.
At Canterbury, where the average age is 86, Clendinen's mother and Emyfish and the rest find themselves older than they ever imagined they would be.
''I'll be 87 in September. I never imagined I would live to be this old,'' Mary Davis said. ``I used to think that 80 was the absolute dropping-off place. Eighty was old. Really old.''
''Your nose grows, your ears get bigger, your eyes get smaller, your hair gets thin,'' said Emyfish. ``I hate it. This is for the birds.''
Despite their surprise at their own longevity, the few men and mostly women maintain a liveliness that Clendinen found endearing and engaging. They plotted to organize the tower's first nude calendar. They decided to write their own obituaries to say what they wanted. They fell in love, they fell out of love, and they still had sex.
When Louise Timm decided to move in with her boyfriend Bob Nelson, her grandchild wanted to know if they'd sleep together. Timm's daughter said yes. ''Oh, good,'' Michael said, relieved. ``That means he's not going to take my bed!''
While Clendinen spent years taking notes on the tower's buzz and conversations, his mother spent the last few years unable to talk.
''Without her being able to talk to me, I needed to develop. . . . I didn't want to treat her as less than a person,'' he said. 'You can't tell what's there. All the advice is, `Don't treat someone with difficulty speaking as not there.' I had fewer and fewer clues. I always felt responsible for improving the moment, as if I were the entertainment committee. I knew I was connecting when I could get her to laugh.''
As his mother grew more and more frail, Clendinen at one point instructed her nurses to take her off medication. Not only did she survive, she became stronger. Yet she continued to float on the edge of life.
''It doesn't matter whether you're a child who comes for ceremonial occasions or whether you try to be there dozens of times. . . . I think you're always guilty that it's not enough,'' he said.
STRANGE GIFT
But the struggle to communicate with his mother by looking at her brought a ''a kind of strange gift,'' he said. ``We finally became intimate. Her guard had been removed. It allowed me to do for my mother, to treat her as a human and try to commune with her in the most fundamental way.''
His mother's death draws the book to a close, but not the tales. There are more to tell.
''The plan originally was meant to be one book. I thought a year or a year and a half would be enough. But it wasn't,'' Clendinen said. A trilogy may well be written. ''By the third or fourth year, I figured out that this is a serial,'' he said. ``Nobody's done this before.''
