The first half of the fourth green logbook, typed in. The rest of that book, July on, is on the front page with the new entries. Newest on top. -- D.T., August 1999

Three years retired today.

I took the flag down off the shelf in the den, the one they folded for me at the ceremony, dusted the case, and put it back. That was the whole observance.

Then, before work, I got out logbook no. 1 and read the first page. The last line says I was up and shaved and standing in the kitchen before I remembered there wasn't anywhere to go. Three years later I have somewhere to go six days a week, and I read that line and it was still true.

After work I called a chief I served with on my last ship. He lives in Virginia Beach now and works for one of the contractors I turned down. Makes good money. Says he hates it. We laughed about that. Then he asked how I was really doing, and I said fine, and he said, "Tillery, you never could lie worth a flip on the phone."

So here's the honest report, since that's what a log is for.

The store is fine. The family is fine. Shannon is better than fine. The house note gets paid on time. I have a good job and a good wife, and for three years I have been getting up at 0530 with nowhere I need to be before ten. Something in me went quiet about the time I took the uniform off, and it hasn't come back. It isn't anything I can fix with the right cable.

Bonnie's right. I haven't told her yet that she's right.

Tubes is thirteen now and sleeps most of the day under the radio table. Some days he and I are about even.

Bonnie said tonight, "Dwayne, you've been down a long time."

I didn't answer her.

I'm writing it here because I didn't.

A boy stood in front of the parts drawers for forty-five minutes this afternoon. About fourteen, skinny, sneakers a size too big. He didn't buy anything. He didn't ask anything. He just read the labels: resistors, capacitors, diodes, the little bags of LEDs. Read every one of them like they were baseball cards.

Tonya asked if I wanted her to say something to him. I said no. She watched him a minute and said, "He's reading those like a menu." He had a library book under his arm, one of the old ones on building radios, the kind with the card pocket in the back.

Not many kids come to the parts drawers anymore. Men my age do, and Mr. Oakes, and a fellow from over in Leland who builds gadgets for his electric guitar. The kids come for phone covers and video game cords.

Mr. Oakes was in today. Tuesday, one resistor. He watched the boy a while too. Then he leaned over to me and said, "That was you." I said, "That was both of us."

When the boy finally left I said, "Come back any time." He looked at me like he'd been caught at something. Then he nodded.

I hope he does.

Shannon turned fifteen Tuesday. Today she got her learner's permit.

North Carolina changed the rules a year and a half ago. It's a graduated license now: she has to hold this permit a full year before she can try for the next one, and every mile of that year a parent has to be sitting up front beside her. I did the arithmetic. That is a year of me in the passenger seat of the Buick with my right foot mashing a brake pedal that isn't there.

She passed the written test on the first try. She took driver's ed at school this spring, and she knows the rules better than I do, and she let me know it in the parking lot.

First drive was in the empty lot behind the store after we closed. Twenty minutes. One time she put it in drive when she meant reverse, and we both hollered, and then we both laughed till she had to put it in park. She has named the Buick "the Barge." In twelve years nobody ever thought to name it.

Wednesday the new Star Wars opened and she went to the first show after school with her friends. Not with her old man. I remember a Tuesday two years ago when she grabbed my arm in the trench. I took it well. Bonnie says I sulked. I took it well for a man who sulked.

Tuesday two students walked into their high school outside Denver with guns. I'm not going to write down the rest. Everybody knows it by now. It was on every TV in the store by the middle of the afternoon, and for about an hour nobody bought anything. People just stood there.

Last night I got up at eleven and found Shannon at the kitchen table with a glass of milk she hadn't touched. She's fourteen. She's a freshman. She said the kids at school were all talking about it, and some of the boys were making jokes, and one of her teachers cried in class, and she didn't know which of those things made her feel worse.

We sat up till almost one. Mostly she talked. She asked me if I was ever scared on the ship. I told her yes. She asked what you do about it. I told her what I know, which is that you do the next thing in front of you, and you do it right, and you look after the people next to you.

She said, "Daddy, that's not an answer. That's a job."

I said it was the only answer I had.

She thought about it a while. Then she said, "Okay. It's a pretty good job."

At 12:30 Bonnie came in in her robe and made grilled cheese for all three of us and never asked what we were talking about.

I don't have anything smart to say about Colorado. I have a daughter in high school, and last night I sat up with her. That's the report.

Mr. Oakes's wife, Miss Lorene, died three weeks ago Saturday. She went in the hospital the first of March and didn't come home. She was eighty. They had been married fifty-seven years.

Bonnie and I went to the funeral. Mr. Oakes stood up straight through the whole thing like he was at quarters. Afterward he shook my hand and said, "Well, Chief." That was all. That was plenty.

He's been in the store every Tuesday since. Each time he buys one resistor. One. Today it was a 220-ohm; last week a 10K. He stands at the back counter and talks for twenty minutes about antennas, about the Pacific, about a station in Antarctica he worked in 1957, and then he counts out the exact change and goes home.

Today he told me that in 1948 he built Miss Lorene a little receiver for the kitchen so she could listen to him on the air and know when he was about to sign off and come to supper. He said she listened for fifty years. He said the house is awful quiet now, even with the rig on. Then he paid for his resistor.

I mentioned it to Bonnie. I said I can't figure out what he's building. She looked at me like I was slow and said, "Dwayne. He's not building anything."

Oh.

The TVs in the store are all Kosovo now. The bombing, and the refugees walking out with whatever they can carry. There's a lot of Navy in it. I know what those watches are like, the ones where the ship is doing something real. I stood some. I'm glad I'm not standing these, and I'm not, all the way.

The Senate voted today. Not guilty.

It came on the TVs around lunchtime and the store went quiet. Tonya turned up the sound on the big set. Two customers, the delivery driver, Tonya and I stood there and watched them read out the votes, one senator at a time.

When it was over a man said, "Well." That was all anybody said. Then somebody asked me where the phone cords were, and I showed him.

I served under five Presidents. I kept my opinion of every one of them to myself while I was in uniform, and I have about decided to keep doing it out of uniform. It's a good habit. It has kept me out of a lot of arguments at Bonnie's mama's table.

Shannon asked me at supper what I think. I told her what I used to tell the young sailors when they asked: I think what I'm paid to think, and right now I'm paid to know where the phone cords are. She rolled her eyes at me. Fair enough.

What I will say is that I'm tired of it being on the TVs. It's been a year. I'd like them back for the weather and the ball games.

Valentine's Day is Sunday. The card is in the glove box and the candy is in the trunk. Twenty years in the Navy, I know how to stage supplies.

The Y2K endcap came today.

An endcap is the display at the end of an aisle, the one you see first when you walk in the door. District sent a diagram of exactly what goes where. Surge protectors on the top shelf. Weather radios at eye level. Lantern batteries, flashlights, a couple of power inverters for the car. And a sign about as big as a card table that says BE READY.

I built it this afternoon. It looks good. I've built a lot of things in my life, and I'll tell you a radar rack is easier to get right the first time than a store display, because a radar rack doesn't care what it looks like from the door.

Customers are asking more now. Mostly I answer the same way I did in November: the big computers have people working on them, your toaster doesn't know what year it is, and a weather radio is a good idea in this town no matter what the calendar says. I believe all three of those.

Tonya says her Y2K plan is two little boys, a can opener and her mama's house. Shannon says the computer club teacher had them each bring a floppy disk with a test program on it home and run it, and the dinosaur in the den passed. So the Tillerys are covered.

Stamps went to 33 cents last week. Bonnie says that's the real emergency.

I've been checking in to the county net on Tuesday nights. It helps. It's not the same as being better. I know the difference.