As Mr. Hill, who now owns his own data processing company in California, sees it, Mr. Perot may be impelled by a sense of marvel and slight disbelief at the course of a life that has taken him from a routine small-town childhood to billionairehood.

Each is to become "the one" in the family "who would remember everything"; and with the slippage of time, each will come to regard his or her small-town childhood as a kind of touchstone, a still point in a world of random change.

There is nothing like a small-town childhood to keep one chronically amazed.

THEY HAVE TRAVELED separate but similar trajectories, these two young actresses: small-town childhoods in the Deep South, leaps from the safety of small colleges to large universities, intense immersions in intensely serious theater schools.

Having experienced a quintessential small-town childhood, Congressman Duffy wants nothing less for his own family.

Somewhere in her life, whether in her small-town childhood in Indiana or through the older men she married, or on her own, Ms. Mosbacher learned how to bend the rules to fit the contours of her big personality.

The hardscrabble, small-town childhood with an abusive father and adoring mother; the heady rise to the top and the depressive slide downward, rendered with the theatrical equivalent of splashy cinematic montage - these elements are served without spice or shading, as if familiarity alone were enough to give them emotional clout.

For the lyrical set pieces, for one thing; the haunting evocations of a small-town childhood so sensually rich in detail that the prose is sometimes hypnotic.

In the meantime, one could do worse than follow the advice of Benay Bubar, whose aversion to taxis was honed by her small-town childhood in Glens Falls, N.Y., where a four-mile ride to the train station costs $6 and cabs are called, not hailed.

The idyll of her small-town childhood was brought to a harsh end by the death of her mother in 1903.