My father grew disillusioned with Grantsville -- indeed, with Utah as a whole, though I didn't catch on to this for many years -- fairly quickly, if he had ever been "illusioned" at all. So it was that at the end of that school year, we moved away from that rather soporific burg and settled in as temporary refugees at my uncle's house.

My father's younger brother Dennis, with wife Ellen and children who at the time numbered four or five, had fled Los Angeles shortly before my own parents did, and had taken up residence in a town called Liberty -- a rural sprawl that at the time was so sparsely populated as to make Grantsville look like New York City by comparison.

I don't recall many gospel lessons from the summer we spent in Liberty, but I do recall plenty of the stuff of which a mythic, archetypal boyhood is made. I recall catching grasshoppers with my cousins Stephen, who was my age, and Denny, who was a year younger, and using them for trout bait in the stream that ran behind the house. I recall playing baseball in a huge field of alfalfa with piles of horse droppings for bases. I recall the way the ancient, rusting hay baler on the property could serve either as a fort or a weird race car or a spaceship, depending on the needs of the imagination. I recall marveling at my cousins' boasts of how many girls they had kissed, and wishing I could be like them. I recall eating contests in which Steve and I matched each other silver-dollar pancake for silver-dollar pancake (a practice that lasted well past the age when both of us should have known better). I recall the arcane magic of an unfinished basement crammed with my uncle's musty Louis L'Amour and Edgar Rice Burroughs paperbacks. I recall evenings with the whole of both families relaxing in the living room, with fat logs crackling in the fireplace and programs like Grizzly Adams and Little House on the Prairie and Battlestar Galactica on the television -- either that, or a movie like A Man Called Horse, playing on a prototypical VCR the size and shape of a battlestar itself. (I vaguely recall hearing Richard Nixon's resignation speech that summer, too -- and wondering what in the world this "Watergate" thing was that everyone was talking about.)

Lest you think all was sweetness and light, I recall seeing a stillborn foal be delivered, and seeing a sheep get butchered, and seeing chickens run around with their heads cut off. I recall my terror when Denny and I found Aunt Ellen's mare lying dead from delivery complications in the back pasture. Worst of all, I recall the first stirrings of panic at the thought of another school year as the youngest in my class, the freak.

And I recall the lessons I learned that summer, the summer of '74, the summer I turned seven. Not gospel lessons, exactly, but important. The lesson that things can get hurt and die -- and often do, in ugly ways. The lesson that older cousins are free to punish younger cousins when no adults are around. And the lesson that little children -- even consenting little children -- who show their private parts to each other are very, very wicked indeed.

I learned my lessons well.

Baptism minus one year and counting.