A Place Called Canterbury : Tales of the New Old Age in America

An "affectionate, touchingly empathetic" (Janet Maslin, The New York Times ) look at old age in America today Welcome to Canterbury Tower , an apartment building in Florida, where the residents are busy with friendships, love, sex, money, and gossip-and the average age is eightysix. Journalist Dudley Clendinen's mother moved to Canterbury in 1994, planning-like most the inhabitants-to spend her final years there. But life was not over yet for the feisty southern matron. There, she and her eccentric new friends lived out a soap opera of dignity, nerve, and humor otherwise known as the New Old Age. A Place Called Canterbury is both a journalist's account of the last years of the Greatest Generation and a son's rueful memoir of his mother. Entertaining and unsparing, it is essential reading for anyone with aging parents, and those wondering what their own old age might look like. In 1994 writer Dudley Clendinen's mother--a Southern matron of iron will but creaking bones--sold her house and moved to Canterbury Tower, a geriatric apartment building with full services and a nursing wing, on Tampa Bay. There she landed in a microcosm of the New Old Age, filled not just with old Tampa neighbors but also with strangers from across the country. Wealthy, middle class, or barely afloat; Christian, Jewish, or faithless and proud; widowed, or still married; grumpy or dear--they had all come together, at the average age of 86, in search of a last place to live and die. This is an often hilarious, deeply moving look at how the oldest Americans are living with the reality of longer life. Peopled by brave, daffy, memorable characters determined to grow old with dignity, this is a chronicle not just of the last years of the Greatest Generation, but also of the devoted workers who tend to them, and of their children, the hapless Boomers, as they are drawn into an indeterminate old age with their parents.--From publisher description A journalist chronicles the lives of the elderly residents of Canterbury Towers, an assisted living community, and their philosophies on old age, including the journalist's mother