Typed in from the second green logbook. Somewhere in the spring of this one I quit putting the weather at the top of every entry, the way you do in a deck log. I didn't notice I'd stopped until I typed it in. This is the year I got the store, and the year we lost Dad. Newest on top. -- D.T., August 1999

Bonnie and Shannon went to see Titanic tonight. It's Shannon's second time. She saw it with her friends opening weekend, and there is a picture of the boy in it taped up inside her closet door, which I am not supposed to know about.

I stayed home. I spent twenty years on ships. I don't need to pay money to watch one sink for three hours. Bonnie says it isn't about the ship. Shannon says, "It's about love, Daddy." I said the ship sinks either way. They went.

I got on the radio. Forty meters was wide open. Talked to a man in Nova Scotia who used to fish for a living, a retired lineman in Ohio, and a lady in Georgia who has been a ham since 1952 and has a better signal than I do. It seems to me everybody on the air between Christmas and New Year's is a little lonesome. Maybe that's just me listening.

First Christmas as manager. We beat last year, a little. District sent a card.

First Christmas without Dad. Paula drove down from Charlotte with her boys and we did Christmas at Bonnie's mama's like always. I was all right until Bonnie's daddy handed me his TV remote and asked could I make it work. I did. Then I had to go sit out in the car a while.

They got home at 11:30 with red eyes. Shannon said, "You would have liked it." I said maybe. Bonnie said, "No, he wouldn't have. But he'd have cried." She's probably right.

Back on the air.

Put a wire antenna up in the big pine this morning while Bonnie and Shannon were at church. A dipole for forty meters. I got the rope over the limb on the fourth throw with a fishing sinker, which is three throws better than I expected at my age. Ran the coax in through the den window and hooked up the rig for the first time in nine years. I let it go about '88, when I made chief and there wasn't time, and after that it just stayed in the box, through three moves.

It came right up like it had been waiting. I tuned around, called CQ a couple of times, and a man in Tennessee came back to me. We talked twenty minutes about nothing: his tomatoes, my new house, the weather both places. Then I told him about Dad. I don't know why. He said he lost his in '89, and then he said, "It takes a while." Then 73 and he was gone.

I've been a ham since I was sixteen, and I had forgotten this part. You put a signal out into the dark and somebody answers.

The man who got me to do it is Mr. Oakes. He came in the store in September for coax connectors, watched me put one on for him at the back counter, and asked if I was a ham. He's seventy-nine. He was a radioman in the Navy in the Pacific during the war and he has been on the air ever since. He told me how high to hang the wire and which way to run it, and he told me to quit making excuses, in about those words.

A ham's radio room is called the shack. So now I work at the Shack all day and come home to the shack at night. Bonnie says that's too many shacks for one man.

Tubes sleeps under the operating table. Dad would like that.

(Typed-in note: I have left my call sign out of all of this. It's on my QSL card if you work me on the air.)

Second weekend in Goldsboro. Paula took the house. I took the shop.

The shop is the cinderblock building out back where Dad worked after he closed the storefront downtown. Forty years of a TV man's life. Tubes, the glass kind, in boxes labeled in his handwriting. Schematics for every set anybody in Wayne County ever owned. A tube tester older than I am. His soldering iron hanging on its nail. It still smelled like solder and coffee and him.

I found the manual.

The book from the kit, the one he bought me at the Radio Shack downtown in 1970. It was in the bottom drawer of his desk in a manila envelope with DWAYNE on it in his block capitals. Inside was the manual with my handwriting in the margins. Fourteen-year-old handwriting. WORKS!! next to the radio. A question mark next to the one I never did get right. He kept it twenty-seven years. He never said one word about it.

I sat down on the floor of that shop and cried the way I haven't since I was a boy. Tubes, the dog kind, came and leaned against my leg. After a while Paula came looking for me and sat down on the floor too, and we stayed there till it got dark.

I brought home the manual, the tube tester, his soldering iron and one box of schematics I will never need. A man from Kinston who still fixes old radios is coming for the rest. Dad would want it used.

The store is fine. My people covered for me three weekends running, and district was decent about the whole thing. I'll say that for them.

We buried Dad this morning in Goldsboro, next to Mama.

Half the town came. I didn't know that many people owned a television in 1965. Men my age came up and told me Dad fixed their family's set when they were boys and wouldn't take money when times were bad. A woman told me he drove out to her mother's farm in an ice storm in '73 so her daddy, who was dying, could watch the ball game. I never knew any of that. He never told it.

I thought about wearing my uniform. I wore my suit. Dad liked my suit.

Shannon read the Twenty-third Psalm and didn't stumble once. Bonnie held my hand the whole service and I let her.

We have his dog. Tubes is a beagle, eleven years old and gray in the face, and he rode home in the back seat with his head on Shannon's knee. Dad named him Tubes, which tells you everything you need to know about Dad. Bonnie has said for seventeen years that she is not a dog person. Tubes is asleep on her feet as I write this.

Dad died this morning.

Paula called at 0640. His neighbor saw the porch light still on after daylight and went over, and found him in his chair. The doctor says it was his heart, and it was quick, and he wouldn't have known. He was sixty-seven.

I called district and they said go. Bonnie's packing. We leave for Goldsboro in an hour.

I talked to him Sunday. He asked how the store did Saturday. I told him. He said, "Well, look at you."

That's all I can write.

We own a house.

Moved in Saturday. The first house we have ever owned. Twenty years of Navy housing and rentals, and now there's a mortgage with my name on it and a yard that is mine to mow. Brick ranch, three bedrooms, a carport, a little den off the kitchen that I've already started calling the radio room, and in the back yard a pine tree that has to be eighty feet tall.

First thing I looked at when the real estate lady walked us out back was that pine. Bonnie said, "I know what you're thinking." I said, "Antenna." She said, "I was going to say shade."

Sunday morning I came into the kitchen and Bonnie had the little TV up on a box and told me Princess Diana had been killed in a car wreck in Paris. Shannon sat on the floor in front of that TV most of the morning. I carried boxes past the two of them all day. I didn't know what to say to either one of them, so I kept carrying boxes, which I suppose is what I do.

Labor Day. Worked, naturally. The minimum wage went up today, which my part-timers noticed before I did.

Store manager, as of today.

District called Friday. Curtis is taking a bigger store over in Fayetteville, and this one is mine. Eight months from the day I put on the name tag. Bonnie says she knew. Bonnie always says she knew.

Curtis left me a list on the back of a strip of register tape:

- Back door sticks. Lift and push.
- Lady with the little white dog pays in quarters. Let her count them.
- Never let the battery wall go empty.
- If the parts drawers get out of order it takes a week to fix. Don't let it happen.
- You'll be fine, Chief.

He's the first person at that store who ever called me Chief. He waited until he was leaving to do it.

It's a small store. Me, one full-time associate who has been there longer than I have and is taking it well, and a couple of part-timers. But I'm responsible for something again. I had forgotten how much I like that. I'd forgotten what it weighs, too.

A new name tag is coming. It'll say DWAYNE and under that MANAGER. Shannon says that is a promotion from a first name to a first name with a job.

Wx: clear and cool. Wind N, light. Good seeing.

Easter. Church with Bonnie's family and ham at her mama's after.

Tonight I took Shannon down to the river to look at the comet. Hale-Bopp. It's been getting bigger all month. We parked downtown and walked out on the riverfront after dark, and there it was, low over the water to the northwest, above the trees on the other side: a bright fuzzy head and a tail you can see with no help at all.

I brought my old binoculars, the 7x50s I bought in Subic Bay in '81. In the binoculars you can see there are two tails, a wide white one that curves and a thin straight blue one. Shannon held them a long time and didn't say anything. Then she said, "It won't come back until I'm dead, will it?" I told her it won't be back for a couple thousand years, so it's nothing personal. She said, "So this is it." I said, "This is it." She handed the binoculars back and then took them again.

I stood a lot of night watches. I've seen a lot of sky. I don't think I ever looked at it next to somebody who was seeing it for the first time. She's twelve. She'll remember this. So will I.

Wx: cold rain.

Day off. Took Shannon to see Star Wars, the new version with the extra parts put in.

I saw it the first time in the summer of 1977, on liberty from ET school at Great Lakes, Illinois. Twenty-one years old, in a theater in Waukegan with three other sailors, and when the big ship came over the top of the screen at the start, all four of us ducked.

Shannon didn't duck. She's seen it on tape a dozen times. But she grabbed my arm during the part in the trench, and she let go before anybody could see, and I didn't say anything. I'm writing it down here so I have it.

She's twelve. There aren't going to be many more Tuesdays when she wants to go to the movies with her daddy. She had a teacher workday. I got lucky.

Store is slow. Curtis says every January and February is a hangover: Christmas returns, and people paying off their charge cards. He has been teaching me the ordering and the schedules and the paperwork, which is the part of the job most like the Navy, and the part I'm best at. He says he has put my name in with district. We'll see.