For twenty years the Navy paid me to keep radar and radios working, and for three years now the Radio Shack in a strip center off College Road has paid me to sell batteries, phone cords and remote-control trucks. I've kept a log since the week I retired, in green government record books, the way I kept logs in the Navy. My daughter says a journal is good for you and she built this page for me with what she learned in computer club, so blame her. Entries go on top. I write the way I kept a log: date, what happened, what I did about it. Mostly.

Day off. First one since before the storm.

Took Shannon out in the church parking lot in the Buick so she could practice her three-point turns. She is fifteen and has her learner's permit and she drives the way I used to drive a destroyer in a channel, which is to say too careful and then all at once. Bonnie sat in the back and pretended to read the paper. At one point Shannon said, "Daddy, you're doing the thing with your hand," and I was. It's the hand I used to put on a young sailor's shoulder when he had the scope and I didn't like what I was seeing. I put it in my lap.

Last night the moon came up full and orange over the tree line where the big pine used to be. Bonnie and I sat on the steps and didn't say much. She said, "You're thinking about that county job." I said I was. She said, "Then fill out the application, Chief." She only calls me Chief when she's serious.

So I'm going to. The county is hiring a communications technician for the emergency operations center. It pays less than the store with commission. It has a pension I'd be too old to fully vest in. I don't care. More on that below, or above, depending how you read.

Store's been open again since Monday. Power's back on our side of town. We still have a water line on the carpet by the back room and a smell I can't name.

District called this morning about the numbers. The numbers were bad, on account of us being closed four days and then everybody in town spending their money on chainsaws and plywood, which we don't sell. He knows that. He called anyway, because somebody calls him. I said yes sir and meant it. You don't spend twenty years in the Navy without learning that the man on the phone has a man on his phone.

Then he said, "And let's get that Y2K endcap back up." So tonight I rebuilt it: surge protectors, weather radios, lantern batteries, a sign that says BE READY. Everybody in Wilmington is as ready as they will ever be. We just did it for real.

Eli came in after school. Eli is fourteen. He has been coming in since June to stand in front of the parts drawers and read the little labels on the resistors like they're baseball cards. Today he had his hands in his pockets and didn't say anything and I finally asked, and his family's apartment by the river took water on the first floor and they're at his aunt's. I bought him one of the electronics project kits off the shelf with my own money and told him it was a store promotion. He knew it wasn't. He said thank you like a grown man. I had one of those kits when I was fourteen, a hundred-and-some projects on a board with springs to wire into, from this same outfit. My dad bought it for me in a store in Goldsboro that isn't there anymore. It's the whole reason I ended up an ET. The manual is still on the shelf over my radio.

Four days on the net. I'm home. I slept eleven hours.

For anybody who doesn't know: I've been a ham since I was sixteen. When the county opens the emergency operations center for a storm, they bring in ham operators to run radios to the shelters, because when the phones go down and the cell sites go down, a guy with a battery and a wire in a tree still works. I signed up with the county's emergency group in the spring of '98, and until this week all I'd done with them was drills. That's on me. When Hurricane Bonnie came through in August of last year they called me for the net, and I kept the store open and sold batteries instead, and I have been sorry about it ever since. Not this time.

I had the shelter at one of the high schools. Mostly it was plain traffic, and plain traffic is the job: they need cots, they need baby formula, they need a nurse who can read a diabetic's insulin chart, they have a man with a heart condition who left his pills at home. I'd take it down and pass it up to the EOC and an hour later a truck would show up. I did not do anything brave. I wrote things down and read them back and kept my transmissions short.

But I want to say this plainly, because this is supposed to be an honest log. Since I retired I have not felt like I was any use to anybody except as a paycheck. I've been down. Bonnie says it's more than down, and she's probably right, and we have talked about me seeing somebody about it, and I've been putting it off because Chiefs don't. On Thursday night at two in the morning, with the generator going and a woman thanking me for getting a message to her son in Raleigh that she was alive, I felt like myself for the first time in three years.

When I came home Bonnie looked at me and said, "There he is." That's all. "There he is." I had to go stand in the yard for a minute.

The news from inland is terrible. Rivers still rising. A whole town up by Tarboro under water. People on rooftops. We got off light here, and I say that with our pine tree in pieces on the lawn and my antenna somewhere under it.

(Wrote this on a legal pad at the EOC. Typed it Sunday.)

0300. Wind like a freight train. Floyd coming ashore down by Cape Fear. Power out across the county. Shelter on emergency power, all well. 212 people, 3 dogs nobody is supposed to have. Talked to Bonnie on the landline at her sister's before it went dead. They're fine. Shannon asked if I was scared. Told her the truth, which is that I'm too busy.

Never seen anything like it. Not in the Navy, not anywhere.

Floyd is the biggest storm on the TV map I have ever looked at and it is pointed at us. When I unlocked the door at ten there were people waiting on the sidewalk. We were out of D batteries by eleven. C's by noon. Weather radios by one. Lantern batteries, then 9-volts, then the little flashlights by the register, then the big flashlights, then the adapters so you can run a radio off your car. By three o'clock a man was buying AA's to put in a D-size spacer because somebody told him it would work. (It will, for about twenty minutes.)

Most people were decent. A few were not. One man yelled at Tonya, my part-timer, because we didn't have what he wanted, and I stepped in and told him that nobody in this building was the reason there's a hurricane, and he left. An old lady bought the last weather radio and then went and gave it to a young mother behind her with a baby on her hip. I will remember that one.

And yes, every single one of them, the register asked me to ask for their name and address, and I asked, and every single one of them looked at me like I'd lost my mind. Half of them said "You're asking me that NOW?" I said, "Ma'am, I have to ask. You don't have to answer." Most of them laughed. It helped, oddly.

The beaches are under evacuation. Bonnie took Shannon and the dog and drove to her sister's in Greensboro this afternoon. It took them seven hours. I stayed to close out and board up, and then I report to the EOC. Standing in the driveway watching the car go I thought about all the times it was the other way around, me on the ship, Bonnie on the pier. Twenty years of that. Now she's the one driving off and I'm the one staying. I don't like it from this side either.

Worked. Retail doesn't get Labor Day. Bonnie's family had the cookout without me and saved me a plate.

Dennis finally gave up and came ashore up the coast Saturday after sitting off us for most of a week. We sold a lot of batteries for that one too. It's funny. I spent a career fixing SPS-something radars that could see a gull at twenty miles, and now my big contribution to national readiness is knowing which drawer the 9-volts are in.

That's not fair to the job and I know it. People come in with a problem and I can usually fix it: the right cable, the right adapter, a fuse, a little advice. I like that part. What I don't like is the part where I'm forty-three years old and a twenty-six-year-old kid from district tells me my attachment rate on cell phone accessories is below target. In the Navy I'd have had him field day the berthing compartment. Here I say "I'll work on it."

Twenty years I was somebody. Chief Tillery. Guys came to me. Now in the store people say "Excuse me, do you work here?" and I'm wearing a name tag.

I'm not writing that to feel sorry for myself. I'm writing it because I haven't said it out loud to anybody, and I think I need to.

Everybody's watching Dennis out in the Atlantic. First battery rush of the season. We'll see a bigger one before this year is out, mark my words.

Regulars this week. Mr. Oakes, who is eighty-one and a ham like me and comes in twice a week to buy one resistor. One. A 47-ohm, a 1K, whatever. He doesn't need it. His wife passed in the spring, and I figured out a while ago that the resistor is the price of ten minutes of talking about antennas. I have started keeping a pot of coffee going on the back counter on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

And Eli, the kid at the parts drawers. Today he asked me what a capacitor does, and I gave him the water-tower explanation, and his face did the thing that means somebody just switched on. The parts drawers are about half the size they were when I was his age. The other half of the wall is phone cases now. I understand why. It still makes me a little sad.

First entry on line. Shannon is standing behind me.

Everything before today I typed in from the green logbooks, two weeks of evenings at the kitchen table. The last two are at the bottom of this page and the rest are on the pages linked up top, three years of it, newest first like this one. I fixed my spelling and left the rest alone.

Particulars, for the record: Dwayne Tillery, 43. Electronics Technician, U.S. Navy, 1976 to 1996, retired as a chief. Married to Bonnie 19 years. One daughter, Shannon, 15, smarter than both of us. Moved to Wilmington when I got out because Bonnie's people are here and because I wanted to be near the water even if I wasn't going to be on it anymore. At the store three years, manager since April of '97. Open ten to nine, Sunday noon to six. Salary plus a little commission. My Navy retirement makes the difference.

Shannon says I should say why I'm putting it where strangers can read it. I don't know yet. She says that's allowed.

Shannon found the logbooks.

They're on the shelf in the den, three green ones full and the fourth half done. She read the one from '96 before I caught her, and she wasn't sorry. She said, "Daddy, you wrote about Hurricane Fran like it was a ship."

Then she said I ought to put them on the Internet. She's been making web pages in computer club since last fall, and she says she can make me one of the free ones, where you get your own address.

I said who on God's green earth would want to read three years of a Radio Shack manager's log. She said, "Me."

I've been thinking about it all week. There are some things in those books that are nobody's business but Bonnie's and mine, and those will stay in the books. The rest, I don't know. Maybe there's a man out there who retired and doesn't know what to do with his hands either.

Bonnie said, "Let her." So I guess we're doing it.

The Kennedy boy's plane went down off Martha's Vineyard a week ago Friday night, and the TVs at the store have had hardly anything else on since.

Fourth of July. Store open noon to six, like any Sunday.

Sold two boom boxes, a set of walkie-talkies to a family headed for the beach, a cassette adapter for a car stereo, more batteries than I can count, and one resistor, a 1K, to Mr. Oakes, who came in on a Sunday this time. I'm thinking about keeping a pot of coffee on the back counter for him.

The boy from the parts drawers came back. Third time. Today he asked what the colored stripes on a resistor mean. I showed him the color code, and he wrote it on the back of his hand in ballpoint. His name is Eli. He's fourteen. He says he's going to build a radio. I didn't tell him what I built at fourteen. I'll tell him when he's built his.

Tonight Bonnie and Shannon and I watched the fireworks over the river from downtown with about everybody else in Wilmington. The battleship was lit up on the other side of the water. I stood a lot of Fourth of July watches, a few of them in places where nobody was shooting off fireworks for fun. Tonight I stood on the riverfront with my wife's hand in mine and felt like a man watching from the pier. It's a good view. I miss the ship anyway.