MOST PEOPLE KNOW my father through The Twilight Zone. Some can quote a portion of the introduction and many can hum the mesmerizing music. They are familiar with the man in the dark suit standing against a dramatically lit set, intoning cautionary observations about human beings, fate, or the universe.

My father could command an audience with his presence and his insights. He could also scare the hell out of viewers—many can still recall specific scenes and recite bits of chilling or poignant dialogue from favorite Twilight Zones:

“It’s a cookbook!”

“Room for one more, honey.”

“We never left the earth! That’s why nobody tracked us. We just crashed back into it!”

“This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon, in the last calm and reflective moment—before the monsters came.”

And so many more.

But the man I knew, my dad, was not the one the public saw. Not this black and white image walking slowly across an MGM sound stage, cigarette in hand, speaking in a tight, clipped voice, introducing that week’s episode; not the Angry Young Man of the Golden Age of TV; not the writing professor, the documentary narrator, or the commercial pitchman, and certainly not the dark and tortured soul some have suggested.

In Twilight Zone reruns, I search for my father in the man on the screen, but I can’t always find him there. Instead, he appears in unexpected ways. Memory summoned by a certain light, a color, a smell—and I see him again on the porch of our old red lakeside cottage, where I danced on the steps as a child. He will emerge, come back to life, just like the old snapshot in the album, just like the day the shutter clicked and the picture froze. There he is, playing the stone game, holding it tucked into one hand behind his back. I am one of the children there, his youngest daughter. I see us in our summer shorts, barefoot, all lined up in rows, my sister, our friends, our tiny, sunburned shoulders touching, guessing which hand holds the stone, moving down a step, closer, closer to my father who waits to shake the winner’s hand.

I think of his Twilight Zone episode: “A Stop at Willoughby,” a simple, serene time imagined through a train window. A day just like this.

On a summer afternoon the wind blows hot, humid air, and for just a fraction of a moment, my father, all of us, are there.