When I was six, my whole world changed. From the giant, polyglot world of Los Angeles, my family moved to what seemed like the tiniest, most isolated backwater conceivable -- Grantsville, Utah. Situated in the desert thirty or forty miles west of Salt Lake City, Grantsville was a town with little or nothing to recommend it to outsiders -- except, perhaps, the opening for an industrial arts teacher at the local high school, and the nearly uniformly Mormon population.

I'm almost certain that my father would have been much happier living the rest of his life in his hometown of Los Angeles. He felt a heavy responsibility to his young family, however, and believed that his children would be much safer -- both physically and spiritually -- living and growing up in the bosom of a small Mormon community. Thus, the move to rural Utah, where he faced a fifty-percent reduction in pay, a loss of tenure on the job, and a rejection of his every application for the administrative positions of which his new doctoral degree made him worthy.

In light of this all this reasoned sacrifice, I find it most interesting and ironic that the first time I was offered a cigarette -- indeed, the only time that I can recall being offered a cigarette -- was in Grantsville. But I'm getting a wee bit ahead of myself.

We moved to Grantsville in late October or early November of 1973, after I'd already gotten in a few weeks of public schooling at Buchanan Street Elementary in Los Angeles. I'm still not exactly clear on why my parents hadn't returned me to Good Shepherd Lutheran at the beginning of first grade -- perhaps they disliked the religious "misinformation" that seemed de rigueur there, or perhaps the tuition had become unmanageable, or perhaps, most likely, the financial outlay seemed silly when they knew the family would shortly be moving.

Whatever the reason, my short stint at Buchanan Street remains among the most pleasant of my grade-school memories. My class there was a giant hodgepodge of first-, second-, and third-graders, with a teacher, Mrs. Saunders, who recognized a modicum of advanced ability in me and let me study math and English with the older kids. It was for Mrs. Saunders that I wrote my first short story -- a horrific little piece called "Rattlesnakes and Cobras" that frightened some of my classmates to tears and got me voted the winner in the Halloween writing contest. When I declared that I wanted to keep writing stories, Mrs. Saunders brought her husband's typewriter from home for me to practice on. I showed such an affinity for astronomy and geology that she offered to let me stay late with the third-graders when they started their science unit later in the year.

Of course, the move to Utah put the kibosh on that.

I still remember being ushered to my new classroom that first morning at Grantsville Elementary School by the principal himself -- after my mother, with a justifiable lack of faith in the educational system, had insisted on enrolling me in the second grade. "Now, Bill," the principal said in his condescending way as we stood outside the classroom door, "we'll let you try this class for today, and if it's too hard you can always go back with the first-graders."

Piffle. I could have handled third grade without straining the synapses, but my parents didn't want me getting too terribly far ahead of my age group.

My teacher, Mrs. Hunsaker, attended church at the same ward as my family -- as did many of my new classmates. (Small as it was, Grantsville contained enough Mormons to populate several congregations.) The church influence was so strong, in fact, that many of the kids found it difficult to remember that "Sister Hunsaker" was supposed to be called "Mrs. Hunsaker" at school.

I was young enough that the transition from big-city to small-town life was fairly painless. I made friends fairly quickly -- though it was something of an embarrassment to me that, while I attended school with older children, I still had to go to the Primary class for my own age group. Being at school made me feel like a big kid; being at church made me feel like a baby.

From the start, though, it was clear that there was something very odd about my second-grade class. A social phenomenon manifested there that I had never before encountered, not at Buchanan Street and certainly not at Good Shepherd Lutheran. In fact, I've never encountered it again, not in all my years of schooling.

The entire class, with only one exception, had paired itself off into boy-girl couples. One could not be accepted as a legitimate member of the second grade at Grantsville Elementary School, without having a significant other among its number.

I suspect that the hyperemphasis on marriage and families in the Mormon Church had somehow spawned this rather bizarre mating dance, but I can't say for certain. I do know that Mrs. Hunsaker did her best to discourage the pairing off, and to prevent the covert ritualized "weddings" that sometimes took place at recess, but it was to no avail.

Strange as this all seemed to me, I couldn't exactly complain about the results. Back at the schools in Los Angeles, I had ached for a girlfriend in my lonely, desperate six-year-old way -- and lo and behold, I was issued one in practically automatic fashion upon joining my new class.

My arrival was a fortuitous one for Julie Taylor, the one loveless leftover in that classroom of connubial bliss. As the smartest girl in the second grade, she had been passed over in the initial rush to pair up -- which, of course, meant that she and I became a couple, and the class at last achieved a perfect symmetry and balance.

One of the things I liked best about living in Grantsville -- quite aside from the acquisition of a girlfriend -- was the fact that I got to walk to and from school every day. (This, of course, had never been the case in Los Angeles.) On occasion I was even permitted to wander over to the seminary building near the high school -- a small classroom structure where older students were permitted by state law to receive one period of "released time" religious instruction during the school day -- and tag around with the teenaged janitor as he cleaned chalkboards and emptied trashcans.

(One day when I came home late from school, I narrowly avoided a severe whipping after explaining that I'd been helping John load soda-pop machines at the "cemetery" -- the town boneyard being one place I was definitely not permitted to play. It seems ironic to me now that I should ever have confused the two words.)

The high school's athletic field took up two or three blocks in the heart of town, and a narrow winding walkway walled on both sides with chain-link fencing allowed pedestrians to cross this tract with relatively little danger of being trampled by a scrimmaging crush of football players. It was late one afternoon, walking home along this path, that I was offered The Cigarette.

I had just passed from sunshine into shade as the walkway curved between two buildings on the edge of the field. Rounding the curve, I saw two high school kids coming toward me -- large slouching bowlegged brutes in worn jeans and denim jackets. The two of them were just lighting up, and I scrunched myself over to edge of the walkway and tried to make myself invisible as they passed.

I've never been good at that particular trick.

As they drew nearer, I saw them whisper to each other and laugh, and then, when they drew abreast of me . . . the taller of the two whipped The Cigarette out of his pack and held it out to me casually. "Hey, kid," he said in that peculiar drawl common to rural Utah, "wanna smoke?"

Nearly peeing my pants with fright, I shook my head tightly -- then ran the rest of the way home.

When I told my parents about what had happened, my father became almost livid with fury. During the very next fast-and-testimony meeting at church, he set aside a few moments from his regularly scheduled testimony to decry the decline in morality that would permit two irresponsible young miscreants not only to flout the Word of Wisdom on their own accounts, but also to attempt to coerce a young and innocent child of God, not even old enough to be accountable for his own actions, into joining them in their spiritually depraved spiral of vice.

Listening to him speak from the podium, I was filled with a righteous and trembling indignation -- while at the same time feeling somewhat ashamed, as if I had done something wrong by merely wandering into the middle of the the whole ugly scenario. This feeling was only intensified the next day, when a shocked and concerned Mrs. Hunsaker asked me in front of the whole class if I'd really been confronted by two ruffians determined to force nicotine into my virgin lungs. When I allowed that this was true, the rest of the class clucked and cooed over me as worriedly as if I'd been miraculously delivered from the clutches of some fabulous kidnapper.

And the silly thing, as I look back on that walkway through adult eyes, is that the two "ruffians" weren't even serious. They were just having themselves a laugh -- a scary one to a good little boy, sure, but it was all a joke to them. They knew I wasn't about to light up and have a drag.

The Cigarette. I didn't even smoke it, but it got inside me nonetheless. It defined my position in the community -- favored son, shining example, child of God. And it made damn clear that I'd better stay that way.