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Clyde Edgerton treats old age with humor

by Jeanne McDonald

A man (Carl Turnage) walks into a nursing home and asks how Medicare works for an aunt who needs convalescent care.

The woman at the financial services desk says, "Medicare will cover the first sixty days but not the first seven hundred and sixty-four dollars of a benefit period. A benefit period is up when the patient hasn't gotten any skilled care in a nursing home...for sixty days. Now, Medicaid can pick up where Medicare leaves off, but you have to meet certain requirements that have a lot to do with hardship and giving out of money...so we really don't do Medicaid.... The coinsurance comes in on the twenty-first day, after twenty days, and Medicare covers everything through day one hundred above ninety-five dollars and fifty cents a day, which is what you have to cover.... [Medicare covers everything} for twenty days. And if she leaves somewhere in there and wants to come back, she can't unless she's been in a hospital for three consecutive days, with her discharge day the day after the third day. See what I mean?"

Old age is nothing to laugh about. For centuries, writers have decried the advancement of physical and mental senility. Juvenal, born in 60 A.D., claimed that old age was "more to be feared than death;" and Jonathan Swift observed that, "Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old."

Miraculously, though, Clyde Edgerton, with seven bestsellers (including Walking Across Egypt, Raney) already under his belt, manages to squeeze plenty of chuckles, and even occasionally hoots, out of readers who delve into his newest novel, Lunch at the Piccadilly (Algonquin, $22.95) which is set in a convalescent home. The plot unfolds through the eyes of the protagonist, Carl Turnage, whose Aunt Lil is a patient at the Rosehaven Convalescent Home, where every day, a small group gathers on the porch. Clara Cochran, "the one who curses and has a glass eye," is the subject of much speculation. "...[D]oes it stay open at night, do you reckon?" muses Mrs. Satterwhite. "It's like they put hers in but they didn't connect it to any nerves that can turn it," another old lady observes. "I don't think they connect it to the nerves, do they?" a more realistic voice chimes in. "Well, they connect it to something, else it can't move around in there right along with the other one."

"But you can't see through a glass eye," says Mr. Flowers.

"I know that," Mrs. Satterwhite says. "But somebody said you could see through a glass eye darkly, didn't they?"

Through these and similar conversations, Carl sits patiently during his visits to Aunt Lil, who is deteriorating daily. But he begins to find comfort, even excitement, in these visits when the social worker, Anna Guthrie, begins to show an interest in him, and when L. Ray Flowers, an ex-preacher with a dubious reputation, teaches him to play a guitar so he can set his poetry to music. After that, even the most mundane remarks of the women become sources for songs—safety patrols, baloney, bacon and beer, and loneliness, which produces the best of the lot, entitled "How Come I Miss You When I'm with You All the Time?"

The attentive Carl does everything Aunt Lil asks of him, but he's trying to work up the nerve to tell her she shouldn't drive anymore. One day, after their usual lunch at the Piccadilly Cafe, Lil convinces Carl to let her get behind the wheel. While Carl is removing her walker from the trunk, Aunt Lil lets the car drift away. "The car is moving along in a wide circle at about two miles an hour, missing one of those big columns, then another, circling around.... Here she comes. Man this is something. He starts walking beside the open door, breaks into a slow trot, puts his hand on the door. For a second he visualizes himself in the secret service."

Carl becomes more and more involved in life at Rosehaven as Lil's deterioration becomes more pronounced and L. Ray Flowers comes up with a plan to combine nursing homes with churches and synagogues, where elderly residents could live during the week and be visited and cared for by church members (Nurches of America, Chursing Homes of the United States).

Edgerton's empathetic ability to capture the voices and concerns of the old without pity or pathos opens our eyes to their emotional and physical concerns, but his dead-pan humor makes this book a delightful read. Still, in the end, we can envision somebody who used to look just like us sitting in those omnipresent wheelchairs or trudging along behind those clunky walkers. And across from us, spinning theories and songs made from real life, will be L. Ray Flowers.