FL Authors: Dudley Clendinen

We conclude our Florida Authors series with a peek inside the retirement community at Canterbury Tower. Tampa native and former New York Times journalist Dudley Clendinen lived there for six years while caring for his ailing mother. He chronicled the lives, laughter and tears of the residents in the book "A Place Called Canterbury."

From January 1, 2000 until the end of 2005, Dudley Clendinen was a "writer in residence" of sorts at Canterbury Tower. The former New York Times reporter and editorial writer lived in Baltimore. His mother lived in Tampa's Canterbury.

Clendinen has many tales about her, but one really illustrates their complex relationship.

"I would be up in Tallahassee interviewing a crusty, old committee chairman and the phone would ring and the secretary would say I think you should take this call' and he would pick it up and say Oh, hello darling how are you? How good to hear your voice,'" Clendinen said with an exaggerated southern drawl. "Well yes, he's right here. Here, it's your mother."

Clendinen said his mother even tracked him down at the New York Times' culture editor's office. "I mean she just would not ever break connection and I assumed she would always be there."

That relationship changed after his mother had a stroke.

Canterbury is a life care community with a nursing home attached. His mother went into the nursing home wing and Clendinen moved in to the tower to be with her during recovery. It was then that he started writing his book: "A Place Called Canterbury: Tales of the New Old Age in America."

"I did something very selfish. I mean, I've never done anything this self indulgent or this irrational as the decision to try to write a book about my mother and her generation and mine and my hometown," Clendinen said. "The characters are wonderful. It's not just the daffy southerner characters that I knew."

For six years, he lived on and off with the residents of Canterbury. As a writer, Clendinen always carried a notebook to record conversations and scenes. He said after a while he became the entertainment.

"You know, we liked each other," Clendinen said. "We had cocktail hour together. We had dinner together. We did our laundry together. We got teary-eyed together. We laughed about things together. It became almost like a tribal experience. It was like an extended family."

Clendinen begins the book with his mother's brush with death, packs it with stories of a lot life at Canterbury and then ends the book with epilogue.

"Her passing was lyrical and poetic and southern and musical and enormously affecting and left me with this feeling of just heavenly peace," Clendinen said.

Clendinen talked with us last year when his book was first released. He has six years worth of notes and hopes to write a trilogy about life at Canterbury.