The staff of the Smoky Mountain News won 20 combined advertising and editorial awards, including a combined 13 first-place honors, at the 2024 North Carolina Press Association annual awards banquet. Awards were won in Division C, the largest division for nondaily publications. 

I hear tell of people, a precious few, who are not permanently tethered to their phones, people who are able to go hours at a time without being accessible or needing to access someone else. People who dare to be unavailable for a period of time, if you can imagine such a thing. Do you know anyone like that? 

The earliest expressions of our daughter’s deep and abiding affection for cute, fragile creatures were frightening and very nearly catastrophic. When she was 4 years old, she liked carrying our helpless cat, Bubby Tomas, around the house with her arms squeezing his torso tightly as if she were performing the Heimlich maneuver, his eyes wide with panic, pleading for rescue. 

Pop culture wants to kill us. At the very least, it wants to make us miserable, to ensure that from an early age we are well on our way to a lifetime of chronic disappointment.

Some sage once observed that your whole life really comes down to just a handful of moments, and it has taken me most of mine to recognize the truth in that.

“What’s wrong with your dog?” If I were an 8-year-old boy on a beach vacation with my family and saw a dog like ours waddling down the shore, I would wonder the same thing. His family is appalled, his father rushing up to apologize and his mother looking stricken, mouth agape. 

I’m trying to get a little work done early one morning, sipping on my first cup of coffee, still in bed, laptop open but nudged up on one side by a persistent miniature dachshund burrowing ever deeper under the blankets. It’s a cold, rainy day, a good one for working from home if you ask me. 

Our son, Jack, is a senior in high school, which means that we are already well into the “season of lasts.” For us, the hardest one of all is the last marching band season.

My Aunt Lillie fed raccoons at her house as long as I can remember, generations of them. When I was at her house a couple of months ago to visit, my brother called and I had to step outside to get a better signal. As we were talking, three raccoons appeared from around the corner of the house no more than 10 feet away and walked upright into the garage as slowly and deliberately as plump, little senators reporting to congress. Lunch time. 

When I was in high school, I was on the basketball team. We weren’t very good, but we loved the game and even during the offseason you would find us on any given Saturday afternoon playing pick-up basketball just for the fun of it for hours and hours until our moms started showing up to take us home for dinner. While we waited on the last of the mothers to arrive, we’d play “horse” or have free-throw shooting contests.