FROM ISSUE #60: CHILDHOOD
JUDITH BARRINGTON is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Long Love: New & Selected Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2018). Lifesaving: A Memoir was the winner of the Lambda Book Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. She is also the author of the bestselling Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art. Short memoirs have been published in many literary journals including Creative Nonfiction, Narrative, Prime Number, Catamaran Literary Reader, and have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes.
ROY WAS A LANDMARK. Everyone who had cause to walk or drive or ride the number 12 bus up or down Tongdean Lane noted his presence just before the narrow, sooty tunnel under the railway that led to a sports stadium enclosed by an S-bend on the hill.
Roy’s house, outside which he sat, thrashing around uncontrollably in his wooden wheelchair, is gone now. It was the last one on the right before the tunnel—a small bungalow squatting at the foot of a grassy embankment along which trains clattered, some headed for London, fifty miles to the north, others almost arrived at Brighton, a few miles down-rail. Today, Tongdean Lane is lined on both sides with tall office buildings that have turned the corner from the main road, where for several decades they have welcomed drivers to Brighton with their boring facades of brick and glass. Large notice boards announce that these not-quite-skyscrapers are home to insurance companies and consultants of nebulous varieties, whose names reveal nothing of their purposes. The buildings have an abandoned air about them, even though someone must come
