Local author and award-winning Smoky Mountain News columnist Chris Cox will make an appearance at Smoky Mountain Roasters in Hazelwood from 2-4 p.m. on Saturday, July 26.

Kayden is doing her very best not to tell me about the preparations she and mom and Jack have made for Father’s Day, but she is six years old, and at this age especially, secrets are like little, wet bars of soap.

Search online, or in a library or bookshop, and you’ll find how-to books about parenting. Recent popular titles include “Simplicity Parenting,” “The Five Principles of Parenting” and “How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk.” There are even books about how not to parent, like Leonard Sax’s “The Collapse of Parenting.” 

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.