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Canterbury Tales

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By KEVIN WALKER

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 4, 2008

TAMPA - If you have a mother, you have an issue.

Most people deal with it through psychiatry or talking it out with friends or siblings. Dudley Clendinen chose a different approach: He spent 400 days living with his mother in a retirement home in Tampa. Then, he wrote a book about it.

That book, "A Place Called Canterbury: Tales of the New Old Age in America" (Viking, $24.95), comes out Monday. It is by turns an insightful and hilarious account of life at Canterbury Tower, the Bayshore Boulevard retirement home his mother moved into in 1994 after her husband died and the difficulties of life on her own outweighed the benefits.

Clendinen, a Tampa native who now lives in Baltimore, had no intention of turning the experience into a book. But by the time the former New York Times national correspondent and editorial board member wrote a long article about his experience in March 2004, his intentions had changed.

He had by then met (or re-met) a colorful, charming cast of characters including Emily Moody (nickname: the Emyfish), who he's known since infancy. "She couldn't become my christened godmother because she wasn't Christian so she became my half-ass godmother," he writes in the book. "Her description."

Heiress to the Maas Bros. department store fortune, she had tried as a young woman to become a Broadway star.

And Martha Cameron, a retired nurse who was one of the first women ashore after D-Day and "whose personal cross to bear was that she was so competent as head of the residents' association that she could find no one to replace her," he writes.

He knew he had the makings of an interesting book.

And he was getting a chance to do something that was very important to him: "close out the relationship" with his mother in a way that brought him some sense of peace.

Living among the elderly in Canterbury Tower, he also quickly realized some of his mistakes. For example, like many, he had tended to think of his aging mother like a young child, someone whose behavior needed to be managed, made predictable.

"We tend to diminish their humanity without even realize we are doing it," Clendinen said.

But did writing the book resolve his relationship with his mother? "I don't think the child-parent relationship is ever resolved," he said.

Then he laughed and added, "I couldn't tell you right now my feelings for my mother, and I just finished writing a book about her. She was complicated, intelligent, loving, manipulative, giving, controlling."

Clendinen, the son of longtime Tampa Tribune editorial page editor James Clendinen, is also the author (with Adam Nagourney) of "Out for Good: The Struggle to Build a Gay Rights Movement in America." He calls the new book "the most self-indulgent thing I have ever done, but also the most fun and the most joyful and enormously satisfying."

Moody, who still lives in Canterbury Tower, said residents are looking forward to reading their story.

"Everyone is quite excited," she said last week. She expects to be satisfied with it. "How could I possibly say anything bad about it? I live here!"

Linda O'Leary, who has replaced Robin - described in the book as "the blond, breathless, dressed-to-the-nines marketing director" - said the entire staff and those living in the building's 125 apartments have been anticipating the book for years. "We knew he had been working on a book for a long time. We just didn't know if he'd ever finish," she said.

Clendinen, a veteran writer, admits it took him many rewrites to get what he wanted.

"I started this book when I was 55," he said. Now he's 63 - "old enough to move into Canterbury Tower myself."

Living Their Third Acts

Finishing the book proved more difficult than Clendinen expected because he found himself dealing with so many issues. There was the child-parent relationship, economics and the soap opera aspects of the life there (Clendinen called the story "God's own soap opera").

Ultimately, what struck him was how, every day, these aging Canterbury Tower residents prove how wrong F. Scott Fitzgerald was when he wrote, "There are no second acts in American lives."

Not only are there second acts, there are third acts. And they are lasting longer than ever.

Clendinen hopes the book will "start a conversation" about taking care of the elderly as Americans' life spans grow longer. Members of his generation - "the dreadfully named boomer generation," as Clendinen calls it - are caught in a situation where, because of medical advances, their parents are living longer than any previous generation. Dealing with this raises many issues, and "there is no training, no course you can take to prepare for it."

The book offers readers a chance "to live vicariously through my experience before they get there," Clendinen said. "I think the book can create a conversation - a needed conversation - the kind of conversations I was having with my friends about our parents, because they were driving us crazy. They were driving us as crazy as we had driven them crazy when we were kids."

Even O'Leary said longevity has become a source of surprise for Canterbury Tower residents, whose average age is 86.

"A lot of them did not expect to be alive this long," she said. "You have people now getting open-heart surgery in their 80s, and they used to never do that."

People could learn a lot simply by living with their aging parents for a time, Clendinen said. Not that the parents would want that.

"One of the assumptions that people make about their parents is that they want their children around all the time, and they don't," he said.

From Bibs To Bravery

Much of the book is filled with stories about people with active lives. Moody, who decided to stop having birthdays many years ago, is one of them. She still laughs about Clendinen mentioning her Emyfish Glamour Bib, a colorfully decorated bib for "ladies who have good jewelry and silk blouses but also drips and dribbles at dinnertime."

"I think my invention sparked his imagination," she said. "Really I think he just thought it was cute."

Cuteness aside, Clendinen said what struck him was "the gallantry, the quiet bravery" of the residents, who know illness and death is the likely way their stay at Canterbury Tower will end.

And the generational differences impressed him.

"All of them came through tough social and economic times, and they all have this gentle, enduring sense of humor about life - they don't whine, they don't complain," he said. "They are not so vain and so self-involved as my generation, and our kids.

"They represent a time that is vanishing."

He found himself surprised at "how resilient they are. How inventive. How flexible. How imaginative, funny, sad and wise. I know a lot of these things, like flexibility and inventiveness, people associate with youth, because we have a youth-obsessed culture.

"But a lot of those qualities you can only attain after having lived a lot of life."

Kevin Walker can be reached at (813) 259-7975 or kwalker@ tampatrib.com.

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