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Only Child

Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo
Postcards to Myself
Peter Terzian

When I was in second grade, I brought home books from my elementary-school library with titles like Fair Is Our Land and Beyond New England Thresholds. These books had glossy pictures of colonial towns with sheep grazing in the commons and forts where cannons were fired on the hour. I pleaded to be taken to these places, to monuments, writers' homes, battlefields, and living-history museums. I planned prospective itineraries on road maps and selected appropriately priced motels from our AAA Guide. I had no brothers and sisters whose wishes needed to be taken into account. How could my parents refuse?

We were a family of four: my mother, my father, me, and my mother's mother, who moved in with us not long after I was born. I grew up thinking of my grandmother as a sort of surrogate sibling. I was her only grandson, and she doted on me, pouring my cereal each morning and picking up my toys every evening. When I came home from school, we would sit together on the lumpy couch in the den and watch children's public television shows. But my mother and father didn't invite my grandmother to join us on our vacations, and she didn't ask to come along. Perhaps ther ... read full excerpt from Only Child ebook