Typed in from the third green logbook. There's a gap at the start of this one, the first five weeks of the year. I thought about writing something in to fill it and decided to leave it the way it is. Newest on top. -- D.T., August 1999

Home at 1900.

Third Christmas at the Shack, second as manager. We did all right. The flyer did its job and Tonya did hers.

Furby is somebody else's problem this year, thank the Lord. Every mother in town has been to every toy store in three counties, and a few of them came in here too, just in case. I told one, "Ma'am, I've sold a lot of things in my life, but never an owl that talks." She said, "Well, what have you got that talks?" I sold her a pair of walkie-talkies. I believe her kids will have more fun with those.

The House voted to impeach the President on Saturday. It was on every TV in the store all day long. Nobody stopped shopping.

Here's the entry I'd have written in the Navy: Store secured 1800. All hands accounted for. No casualties.

Here's the honest one. I'm less tired than I was two Christmases ago and I feel worse, and I don't know why. Bonnie's mama's house was full and loud and warm tonight, and I sat in the corner with a plate on my knee and a smile on my face and wished I was home. Shannon brought me a piece of pound cake and sat on the arm of the chair and didn't say anything. She's fourteen, and she's paying attention. I don't want her to have to.

Merry Christmas, log. Better next year.

First Y2K question in this store today. Probably not the first in the country.

A man about seventy brought in his VCR. The whole VCR, under his arm. He wanted to know if it would still work on January 1st, 2000. I looked at it. The clock was blinking 12:00. I said, "Sir, this VCR doesn't know what year it is now." He thought about that, and then he laughed and said, "Well. That's one thing off my list."

Then a lady wanted to know if her cordless phone would quit. Then a man asked if we had generators, and I said we don't sell generators, and he said, "You'd better start."

Here's the truth as best I know it. Most of what people are scared of isn't going to happen. Some of it might. Nobody knows which, and anybody who says he knows is selling something. The computers that run the power plants and the banks have a lot of people working on them. Your toaster doesn't know what a year is.

That said: a weather radio, a flashlight and a few batteries never hurt anybody in this town. I've been telling people that for two years. I'll say it again next year.

John Glenn came home last Saturday. Seventy-seven years old and back in space. Mr. Oakes, who is eighty, says NASA hasn't called him yet but he's keeping his calendar open.

Shannon is a high school student now, and has informed us it is completely different.

She's fourteen. She catches the bus at 0640, which is the only thing about her life that looks like the Navy. She has a locker combination she won't tell us. She joined the computer club and wants it known that it is NOT the same as the math club. She has already told me the computer in the den is "a dinosaur." I bought it in 1995.

Titanic came out on video last Tuesday. She bought it with money she's been saving since her birthday, and she and Bonnie have watched it three times since. I have now seen the ship sink in pieces, walking back and forth through the den with a glass of tea. It still sinks.

Labor Day. Worked, naturally.

I'm glad about the high school. I'm glad about all of it. I don't know why I sat in the car in the driveway for twenty minutes after work Thursday before I went in the house. I just did. Bonnie saw me from the kitchen window. She didn't say anything about it, and neither did I.

Bonnie came ashore Wednesday night just about on top of us. The hurricane, I mean. Wind and a world of rain, trees and limbs down all over town, power out on half the county. Our house is fine. The pine held. The store's fine.

I need to write down what I did, because I don't like it.

Wednesday morning the county called up the emergency net, and I was on the list for a shelter. And I called the fellow who runs it and told him I couldn't make it. I had a store full of people wanting batteries, and a district manager who wanted the doors open, and one part-timer, and I told myself the store needed me.

So I stayed and sold batteries until we closed, and then I went home and sat in the hall with my wife and my daughter and the dog and a handheld, and listened to the net all night. I heard a young fellow take the shelter that should have been mine. The same one from the drill in May who talked too long. He didn't talk too long Wednesday night. He did fine.

Tonya would have run the store. I know that. She'd have done fine too.

I don't know what I was protecting. The numbers, maybe. Or I was scared I'd get there and find out I can't do it anymore. That's the one I don't want to write, so I'm writing it.

Next time I go. That's an order, Chief.

There is a hurricane named Bonnie coming at Wilmington. I'm not making this up. It's on every TV in the store.

My Bonnie is not amused. Every other customer says, "Better tie her down, Dwayne," and I say, "Been trying for eighteen years." She came by at lunch with a sandwich for me, and a lady in line said, "Is this THE Bonnie?" and Bonnie said, "The original," and the whole line laughed, Bonnie too. So she's amused now. Some.

Batteries going like it's Fran. Weather radios gone by two o'clock. District called to say keep the doors open as long as it's safe. I said yes sir.

The county group passed the word tonight: the EOC may open tomorrow, shelters tomorrow night. My go-kit is by the front door. Tubes keeps sniffing at it like it's a suitcase, which he knows means somebody is leaving.

First drill with the county group.

The county pretended a hurricane was coming ashore at 0800 this morning, and I sat at a folding table in a high school cafeteria with a radio and a clipboard and passed pretend traffic to the EOC for four hours. Shelter requests forty cots. Shelter needs somebody who speaks Spanish. Shelter needs a nurse. Take it down, read it back, pass it, log the time.

I was good at it. I haven't been good at anything in a while. I don't mean the store; the store's fine. I mean the thing where your hands know what to do before you think about it.

A young fellow at the next table kept keying up and talking too long and too fast, and afterward I showed him how to say it in half the words. He wrote it down. That's the first time in two years anybody wrote down something I said.

Got to the store at 1300. Tonya had it handled.

Thursday night Seinfeld went off the air and Frank Sinatra died. Bonnie's daddy has had the Sinatra records going for two days straight. He says only one of those was news.

Joined the county's amateur radio emergency group Tuesday night. Mr. Oakes drove me to the meeting himself so I couldn't back out.

It's about thirty hams who have agreed that when the county opens the emergency operations center for a storm, they'll go sit in the shelters and the EOC with radios and pass messages when the phones and everything else go down. Mr. Oakes did it for twenty years and says his knees retired him before he did. When I told the fellow who runs it what I did in the Navy, he looked like somebody had handed him a present.

I thought about Fran. Sitting in the hall with a transistor radio, listening to other men do the job. I think that's why I said yes.

First drill is next month. I'm to put together a go-kit: a handheld, a mobile rig, a power supply, batteries, a roll of wire, pencils, message forms, a thermos. Bonnie watched me lay it all out on the bed and said, "You're packing a seabag." She isn't wrong.

After supper I went in the den and turned the radio on for the first time since New Year's. Nobody much on. I sat there anyway.

The new district manager came through today. He's twenty-five.

He's all right. He's sharp and he works hard. He has a laptop computer he opens up on my counter, and he talks in percentages. Attachment rate. Average ticket. He wants every cell phone to go out the door with a case and a car charger, and every TV with a cable. He's not wrong. He's just twenty-five.

In the Navy a chief breaks in the new ensign. Everybody knows it and nobody says it, and the smart ensigns let you. Here the ensign breaks in the chief. I said "yes sir" four times before I heard myself. He said, "You don't have to call me sir, Dwayne." I told him it's a habit. It's more than that. I don't know what else to call him.

I turned forty-two last week, and today a man seventeen years younger than me explained to me what an average ticket is. I thanked him.

Tonya is working out fine. She's better at the attachment rate than I am, and the new man noticed. I'm glad for her. I'm not sure what I am for me.

I haven't written since after Christmas. Five weeks. That's the longest this log has ever gone.

Nothing's wrong. That's what I tell Bonnie. It's January. It's retail in January. The store is slow, the days are short, and I'm tired. I go to sleep fine and then I'm awake at 0400 looking at the ceiling. I haven't turned the radio on since New Year's Day. Mr. Oakes asked about it in the store and I told him the antenna needs work. It doesn't.

For ten days the TVs in the store have had nothing on but the President and the White House intern. Customers want to talk about it. I don't.

Watched the Super Bowl last Sunday at Bonnie's daddy's. The Broncos won and everybody in the room was hollering. I sat there four hours and couldn't tell you the score.

Bonnie asked me tonight if I was all right. I said I was tired. She looked at me the way she looks at Shannon when Shannon says her homework's done.

One good thing. I hired a part-timer Friday. Tonya is twenty-four, has two little boys, and goes to nursing school in the daytime. She's quick, she isn't scared of customers, and she laughs easy. Good hire. Best thing I've done in a month.