Typed in from the first green logbook, which I bought at the Navy Exchange in Norfolk the day after I retired. I fixed my spelling and left the rest the way I wrote it. The weather line at the top of each one is a deck log habit. Newest entry on top, same as the front page. -- D.T., August 1999

Wx: clear, cold.

2215. Home.

We locked the door at six. The last sale of the day was a man at two minutes till, buying AA batteries for a toy he had already wrapped. I have sold batteries to fathers since ten o'clock this morning. I believe I have sold batteries to every father in New Hanover County, and some of them twice.

Bonnie's family does Christmas Eve at her mama's. I got there in time for ham and pound cake and fell asleep in her daddy's recliner with my shoes on and a paper plate on my stomach. Shannon took my shoes off. She told me so in the car. I never felt it.

Six months ago this week I was a chief petty officer in the United States Navy. This is the first Christmas in a long time I didn't have duty, or a ship, or a phone on the nightstand that could ring. It's also the first one where I was the one working so other people could have theirs. I thought I would mind that more than I do.

Coming home Shannon asked me if I like my job. I said I like the part where people leave happy. She said, "That's not what I asked." She's twelve. She's going to be a lawyer or a chief.

Tomorrow I sleep until 0700. That is the whole plan.

Merry Christmas, log.

Wx: cold rain.

Christmas rush. I thought I knew what busy was. I did not.

Things I have learned in two weeks, for the record:

1. There is no Tickle Me Elmo in this store. There has never been a Tickle Me Elmo in this store. We don't sell them and never did, and it turns out neither does anybody else, because there aren't any. I have said so about sixty times. A woman on Tuesday asked me would I please check in the back. I went and checked in the back. I knew what was back there. But she'd been to five stores since breakfast, and I had a feeling she needed to see one person go and look.

2. Every boy in Wilmington wants a remote-control car, and every father wants the exact one on the front of the flyer, and the one on the front of the flyer was gone by Thursday.

3. Cordless phones. Grandmothers want cordless phones. One man bought three.

4. The scanners are going to men who sat through Fran in the dark and want to know what's going on next time. I understand that completely. I spent twenty-five minutes with one of them showing him how to put the county's frequencies in. Curtis said I could have sold two more phones in that twenty-five minutes. He's right. I'd do it again.

5. The Christmas flyer is the most-read publication in the state of North Carolina. People walk in with it folded open to the page and a finger on the picture.

I'm on my feet ten hours a day. My back hurts in a way the Navy never made it hurt, and the Navy tried. Three nights this week I fell asleep before supper. Bonnie says I'm getting soft. Bonnie is working the front desk at the dentist's till five and doing all the Christmas shopping on her lunch hour, so she can say what she likes.

Wx: clear, hot, still. You would never know.

Written by lantern.

Hurricane Fran came ashore Thursday night down around Cape Fear. Bigger than Bertha. A lot bigger. The power went off about 2000 Thursday and it hasn't come back. Three nights now.

The house is fine. The big oak on the lot behind us came down across the back fence and missed the house by about the length of the Buick. Friday morning every street in the neighborhood had a tree across it. Bonnie's mama and daddy are fine; their carport is in the neighbor's yard. The dentist's office is closed. The store is closed. Curtis drove by yesterday to say we open when the power does.

Wednesday and Thursday we sold every battery in the building, and every flashlight and every lantern. That was my first battery rush. Curtis says it won't be my last.

Here is what I want to put down.

For twenty years, when weather came, I had a place to be. A station. A sound-powered phone on my chest, a checklist, and somebody to report to. Thursday night I sat in the hall with my wife and my daughter and a transistor radio and listened to the wind take the shingles off somebody's roof, and there was nothing for me to fix and nobody to report to.

Friday morning I went out with Bonnie's daddy's chainsaw like every other man on the street and we cleared the road, and that was good. But it wasn't mine to run, and nobody needed a chief.

I dug a handheld out of one of the boxes in the garage and listened to the ham operators running messages for the shelters. Good operators. Short and clean. I sat on the back steps and listened to other men do the job I'm trained for.

I don't know what to do with that yet. I'm writing it down.

Shannon read by flashlight until the batteries died, which, considering where her father works, is a little embarrassing.

Wx: hot, humid.

First week done.

I have a name tag. It says DWAYNE. No rate, no rank, no last name. Twenty years the name on my shirt said TILLERY and it meant something to a couple hundred people. Now it says DWAYNE and it means "the one who knows where the adapters are."

Curtis, the manager, is twenty-eight years old. He's good at this. He knows every item in the store by its number, and he can sell a cordless phone to a man who came in for a fuse, and the man leaves happy about it. For two days he called me Mr. Tillery until I asked him to quit.

He's been training me on the register. I have trained forty young sailors on equipment worth more than this whole strip center, and it turns out I can be bad at a cash register. Curtis was patient. I've been patient with a lot of nineteen-year-olds in my time. I know what patience looks like. It was strange to see it from the other side.

The register asks for the customer's name and address on every sale. I ask. About half of them give it. An old man told me Friday he's been giving his address to Radio Shack since Nixon, and he's moved three times, and he'd like to know if they've kept up. I told him I'd pass it along.

Here's what I didn't expect. A lady came in Thursday with a VCR that wouldn't talk to her TV. She had been to two other stores. It was the wrong cable. I found her the right one and drew her a little picture on the back of a receipt of which plug goes where, and she looked at me like I'd fixed her car. That part I like. That part felt like the job.

Wx: hot. Thunderstorm 1700.

Took a job today.

Radio Shack. The one in the strip center off College Road, between the dry cleaner and a sub shop. Sales associate, on what they call the manager-in-training track, which means I sell batteries and learn the register and in six months or a year they decide if I can run a store. I start Monday.

How it happened: I went in Tuesday for a phone cord and ended up forty-five minutes at the counter with the manager, going over a scanner a customer had brought back. He asked me where I learned all that. I told him. He said, "Ever think about retail?" I said I had not thought about retail one time in forty years. He said the district was hiring. I said I'd think about it, and I did, and here we are.

It pays less than the contractors. With my retirement check we're fine. And I'll be home every night, which Bonnie has not been able to say about me since 1980.

What I didn't tell him: when I was fourteen, Dad bought me an electronics kit at the old Radio Shack in downtown Goldsboro. A board full of little springs and a book of projects. I built a radio out of it that pulled in a station from Raleigh, and I thought I had invented the world. Dad fixed TVs for a living. He stood in the door of my room and said, "Well, look at you." That kit is the reason I was an ET for twenty years.

Called Dad tonight and told him where I'm working. He laughed so hard he had to set the phone down.

Wx: hot, hazy.

Job hunting. That is the report.

Here's how it goes. I call a defense contractor. The fellow on the phone gets happy when I say twenty years, electronics technician, chief, clearance still good. Then he says, "Now, the position would be in Virginia Beach." Or San Diego. Or a place outside Washington that sounds like a shopping center. I say I live in Wilmington, North Carolina. He gets less happy.

Three of those this week. The one in Virginia Beach offered more money than I have ever made. I told him I'd talk to my wife.

I talked to my wife. I did not tell her the number.

Bonnie has packed up a house six times in sixteen years. She has started over at six churches, found a job in every town the Navy sent us to, and enrolled Shannon in four schools. Her mama is twelve minutes away now. Her sister is three hours up the road in Greensboro. She deserves to unpack one time and not have to pack again, and I'm not going to be the reason she does. I've decided, and I'm not bringing it up.

So: the cable company (maybe), the phone company (not hiring), a TV repair shop that wants a man for about half what the Navy retired me on, and an outfit that fixes two-way radios for the taxi companies that "might have something in the fall."

Bonnie got the dentist's office job. Front desk. She starts Monday. She always gets the job.

The Olympics are on every night. Tuesday Bonnie and Shannon screamed at the TV when the little gymnast stuck her vault on a hurt ankle. Saturday morning we woke up to the news about the bomb in the park in Atlanta. Shannon asked why anybody would do that at the Olympics. I didn't have an answer for her.

Wx: hot, humid. Thunderstorm about 1600.

Up at 0530 again. Nobody told me to.

No watch bill. No quarters. No plan of the day. For twenty years somebody wrote down where I had to be and when, and for the last ten of them it was mostly me writing it down for other people. Now it's Friday and there is nothing on the page.

So I made one. 0600 coffee. 0630 kitchen boxes. 0900 garage. 1200 lunch. 1300 hang the pictures Bonnie picked. I had it all done by 1400, and then I stood in the driveway and didn't know what to do with my hands.

The ham gear is on a shelf in the garage, still in its boxes. The landlord doesn't want wires on his roof, and I don't have it in me to argue with a man I just met.

Tonight the Olympics opened in Atlanta and the three of us ate supper on the couch, which we never do. At the end Muhammad Ali came out and lit the big torch. His hand was shaking and he held it up anyway. Bonnie cried. I said I had something in my eye, and Shannon said, "Both of them, Daddy?"

Wx: rain, heavy. Wind E backing N. Gusts I'd guess at 70 plus.

We got to Wilmington Monday. The furniture came Wednesday. The hurricane came today.

Hurricane Bertha came ashore this afternoon up the beach, somewhere between Wrightsville and Topsail. Power out at 1420. We are in a rented brick house ten minutes from Bonnie's mama and daddy with about forty boxes still taped shut, and I spent the afternoon moving the ones marked FRAGILE away from the windows until Bonnie told me everything marked FRAGILE is towels. She packed them. I believe her.

Shannon was scared at first and then bored, which is the right order. We played Rook by lantern and she beat me twice.

I have ridden out weather at sea that makes this look like a stiff breeze, and I still didn't like it. On a ship you have a job in a storm. Here I stood in the hall with a flashlight and waited for it to be over.

2100. Wind down. Limbs in the yard, porch screen torn, house fine. All hands present and accounted for.

Bonnie's daddy called when the phone came back and said, "Welcome home." He thinks that's funny.

Wx: clear, hot. Wind SW, light. Norfolk.

Log opened.

Retired yesterday at 1000. Twenty years. The captain said nice things and got two of them wrong. They piped me ashore and I walked down between the side boys, and a voice on the speaker said my name and "United States Navy, retired, departing," and that was that. Bonnie cried, which I expected. So did I, a little, which I didn't.

The flag they folded for me is on the kitchen counter in its case, between a roll of packing tape and the coffee pot.

Shannon asked me afterwards, "So now you're just Dad?" I said I was always just Dad. She said, "No. You were Chief Dad."

Bought this logbook at the Exchange this morning. The same green government record book we used in the shop for everything. Force of habit. I've kept one kind of log or another every day since 1976, and I don't see a reason to quit just because nobody is ever going to read this one.

Movers pack Tuesday and load Wednesday. We'll spend the Fourth at the Navy Lodge and drive down to Wilmington Monday week.

0600 this morning I was up and shaved and standing in the kitchen before I remembered there wasn't anywhere to go.