Throughout my childhood, my mother told and retold me that our LDS neighbors (almost everyone) had their "quirks," but I was always to be polite and keep my mouth shut about my beliefs so I wouldn't be 100 percent ostracized instead of only 80 percent.

Avoidance of religious discussion promoted self-preserv- ation and allowed for fragile and privately self-righteous dignity - and it was best to respect their greater number and power.

It was a May evening in 1981 when the fragrance of lilacs could be breathed in as a promise of returned life from winter when a small miracle happened that told me my home town (which I was quite sure did not like me at all) was on the cusp of change.

I was married and the mother of a son when my father and his wife, Chamsie, came to visit for three days. Chamsie had been a fashion model in New York as a young woman and later a buyer for an exclusive store in San Francisco. They had traveled extensively and were living in Indonesia.

There was pressure to show the best of this city to a father I had talked to on three occasions since I was 6 and a stepmother with high standards. There was only one place that might be possible. The New Yorker.

That dinner cost more than my husband's and my wedding rings, but it was worth it. Halfway through the meal, Chamsie said, "Well, I never thought I'd see this nice a place in Salt Lake."

That was the breakthrough moment when I started noticing the small but important steps that were changing this city. Eastern Airlines. A wine store. The Jazz. Bidding for the Olympics. Nordstrom. Ted Wilson (a man with a heart). DeeDee (a woman with ambition). A bagel store that could stay in business. The Salt Lake Roasting Company. The growth of the ski industry.

All of these harbingers did at least one of three things: bring people from other places into Utah, raise standards of sophistication, offer a new political voice. Momentum of all these things and more crashed into the 2002 Winter Olympics bringing enough diversity that we native Utahns are being expected to live up to our too cute slogan of "The World is Welcome Here."

At last I am considered native and not usurper.

At Mayor Rocky Anderson's open forum on the "religious divide," a woman said the real elephant in the room is not religion but political power. Another person stated that to live around another's religion doesn't diminish one's own. Others suggested we look at our commonalities and that both sides (as though there is only LDS and others) need to appreciate the other.

The man who made me ache with feelings from my childhood said that to be a child in Utah in the '50s and '60s "freed him of hope and desire to fit in."

I was surprised and pleased the event was orderly and no one screamed accusations or useless defenses. It wouldn't have been so thoughtful and gently humorous in 1981.

Yes, there is a divide in Utah, but Rocky has made the squabbling children take a time out, shake hands and be civil.

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Rebecca Guevara is a freelance writer living in Salt Lake City.