Of his mother, Dudley Clendinen writes: “She was an extraordinarily charming and thoughtful and also artfully manipulative woman, skilled at moving people around like puppets while smiling at them fondly.”

This description appears in his new book, A Place Called Canterbury, available in stores this week in time for Mother’s Day.

On another page he says: “My mother was deeply sentimental. She loved being wanted. She loved being at the center of things. But I think what she probably loved most was the prospect of being a perpetual presence in her only son’s life.”

For the last 13 years of her life, during most of the time that she lived at Canterbury, Dudley was an attentive presence, especially during his mother’s residence in the nursing wing. In fact, he ultimately logged 400 days and nights as a guest in that life-care community in Tampa, Florida, the city where he had grown up.

Clendinen, a former national reporter and editorial writer for the New York Times, took careful note of the people ─ residents and staff ─ who made up this community. Some of the residents were the old friends and neighbors of his parents in Tampa, people he had known for decades.

The author gives an oftentimes rollicking account of the ways in which the residents acted, recounting the hilarious and occasionally spicy stories of their exploits. To his surprise, he “began to think .  .  . that I had never felt so alive in a way as I did when I was staying at Canterbury, where everyone else was so very old.”

Canterbury’s residents were a group varied in cultures, faiths, and history. However, most of them shared a common approach to the task at hand. As Clendinen says of them, “Most residents simply work at the unexpected task of keeping this mysterious last phase of life meaningful and full.”

He delights in providing readers with phonetic spellings of the drawl characteristic of the native Floridians among them. A woman named Mary Davis, for example, says of a funeral she attended: “That chuhch suhvice is the wors’ thang Ah’ve evah seen.”

The anecdotes keep coming. One such Canterbury tale centers on two ladies, neither of whom would go out in public “unless they have their face and clothes on.” After 10:30 one evening, they each receive a call from the security man downstairs. He informs them they must promptly move their cars away from the front of the building.

Each tells him that they cannot be expected to leave their rooms until they are ready to face the world. He insists they come down, but they haggle with him and reach a compromise. He suggests they put their keys on the elevator and then he will move the cars.

Soon, the two ladies emerged in their nightgowns from their rooms on the same floor at the same time. Each walked down the corridor and, seeing the other, laughed, and deposited the keys in the elevator.

Then, knowing the security camera was focused on them, they stuck out their tongues at the monitor and, “wiggling their septuagenarian butts triumphantly, they sashayed back to their apartments, flounced inside, and slammed their doors.”

Feistiness like this went far to make of the residents good copy for Clendinen. They often provided him with what he told me, in a telephone conversion, was “walking theater.”

In his words, they formed the brave, dotty, poignant, surprisingly spunky life of the village.

The author also found much to admire in the quality of service provided by the staff. Under a director with a passion for detail, they were a group of people motivated by respect and even love for the residents.

Clendinen recognizes this devotion as “a calling.”

The author compares the care offered by this nonprofit life-care community with that of nursing homes that belong to large chains. He believes that his mother lived at least several years longer than she would have in those other places.

His mother had given her Dudley a power of attorney and he used it to make some hard decisions. Chief among them was a resolution not to allow the medical staff to provide antibiotics or insert tubes to keep her alive when her condition became hopeless.

Several times, Clendinen’s mother entered into crisis and seemed about to die but she had a way of coming back from the brink. However, death finally arrived last year when she was in her 92nd year. I found the final scene poignant enough to bring tears to my eyes.

As I have told the author, I want this work to gain many readers. I consider it one of the best I have yet read on the subject of aging.

And I subscribe to the sentiment of a blurbist quoted on the back cover. There Roy Blount Jr. says: “If you’ve ever had a mother, you will love this book.”

Richard Griffin