Anne Serling says that, essentially, she's been working on a book about her father since the day he passed away.   "It was my way of dealing with his death" she says.  Anne has been giving readings from her book —to be published soon and of course announced here!— including a special event during TZ@50...

     There is an episode from the first season of The Twilight Zone. “The idea,” my dad said, “came from walking through the streets of my home town and then taking a long evening stroll to a place called Recreation Park three blocks from my old house and seeing the merry-go-round which was condemned years ago and remembering that wondrous, bittersweet time of growing up.” He talks about the feeling he got, “The mood of that summer night, the remembrances of the time before” and how he then wrote a script called “Walking Distance.” It was broadcast October 30, 1959, when I was four years old.

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     In Binghamton, a small, once bucolic city in upstate New York, down a tree-lined street, there stands a white, two-story house with dark shutters. It isn’t difficult to find. Head down Front Street, straight on to Riverside Drive, right on Beethoven Street, then two blocks and you’re there.

     This is the pilgrimage my father takes every summer until his death. It is 1965. He is forty years old. In ten years he will be gone.

     He starts the car and waits as we call, “Good-bye.” He is going back, he says, “just for a few hours,” and leaning out of the car window, waves. His paratrooper bracelet glints in the sun. I listen as the car’s tires crunch through the graveled road to our cottage. I watch him go.

     I imagine him driving slowly down Bennett Avenue, his old street, and passing by his house. I wonder if, stopping briefly, he pictures his mother still there, opening the front door, seeing him suddenly, a vision she cannot quite be certain of, holding up her hand to block the afternoon sun, or maybe, then, it is his father he sees out in the driveway, washing the old Ford, suddenly dropping the hose, which snakes through the air, spraying memories my dad can almost touch as he imagines both his parents running toward him in a kind of dreamlike, slow motion reverie that only this level of recall can recreate. Or perhaps, driving a little farther, he sees the ghosts of his boyhood friends running barefoot alongside the car, or calling out to him from their porches, waving to him.

     I recognize early on that these visits re-center my dad. That within him there is a kind of desperateness, an urge to go back, a need to touch home plate, to have things the way they were.

     Decades later, I retrace his steps. I take this pilgrimage of his. My husband, who never met my father, is by my side. We get out of the car on Bennett Avenue and follow a little boy on a red bicycle. The child’s hair is blond, not dark. Still, I imagine we are following my father, following him home. The boy rides past the white house marked “67,” the house where I need to be.

     I stop and look, freeze there a moment, as I know my dad did in his many journeys back. I look at what was once his home, slightly in need of painting, a little worse for wear. The garage, we are told by the woman who lives there now, has been added by the owners before. I don’t know how many families have lived there, how many have walked across the front porch. I don’t know how many celebrations or holidays or birthday parties these rooms have held. I know nothing of their lives, only the joy my father had when he lived there decades before.

     My eyes water in the sun, images blur and grow slightly unfocused. I look at that front door, imagining my father as a little boy. I envision him running down those steps, two at a time, crossing the street at the corner, making his way to the park with the bandstand and the free carousel where horses of every imaginable color never stop, and there is music every summer evening, rain or shine.

     I want to walk closer to the house, look through the windows and see the sunlit rooms my father ran through. But I don’t move.

     The woman who lives there now breaks my reverie. She explains she was just on her way out and waves good-bye to us as we thank her and back away.

     We drive by the Jewish Community Center where my dad first met his life long friend, Julius (Julie) Golden. We pass the Alexander Hamilton Elementary School, now a nursing home.

     We reach his old high school, get out of the car and stand on the damp lawn by a plaque that reads: “In honor of Rod Serling, class of 1943, creator of Twilight Zone, award winning dramatist, playwright and lecturer, 1924-1975.” How strange, yet honored, I think my dad would feel to see this commemoration outside his school.

     When we have our picture taken before it, I feel what I often feel: disconnected and acutely aware of the distinct separation between my dad’s celebrity status and the person I knew.

     Inside the school, we are met by Larry Kassan, the Director of Special Projects at the Rod Serling School of the Arts, and the founder of the Rod Serling Video Festival.

     He takes us to the empty auditorium and tells us not much has changed. He shows us where, above the backstage door, my dad once wrote his name. The wood had been removed but someone found it and is having it framed and returned to the school.

     We move on to the Binghamton Forum Theater and see the glass cases in the lobby under the enlarged photographs tracing my father’s life from childhood to adulthood. In one, a dark-haired, smiling little boy stands with his parents. A later image shows him in a tux raising four fingers with one hand and holding his fourth Emmy in the other. There are family pictures, too, of him and my mother, my sister and me. My father holds the back of a teeter-totter, where I sit unsmiling, fighting back tears, having fallen off moments before the photo was taken.

     In another case, off to the side, there is an old souvenir fork from my grandfather’s meat market and photographs with the description: “Meat markets similar to Sam Serling’s store. Binghamton, New York 1920’s.” I look closely; imagining one of these men behind the counters with the worn, gentle face is my grandfather.

     When we are done, the lights are shut off case by case and the displays are once again cast in darkness, only our reflections looking back.

     At Recreation Park, we walk by families sitting on brightly colored blankets as we follow the music. The bandstand, the carousel, it is all still there, just as it was decades ago when my dad ran or peddled like mad to get to the park dropping his bike by the tree near the merry-go round that, even today, now refurbished is still free for all to ride.

     As I stand there, on the periphery of my father’s childhood, looking at these monuments of his past, I am struck by the likeness recreated in the set of “Walking Distance.” More than any other character he created, I think my dad identified most with Martin Sloan, the protagonist in that Twilight Zone episode. A middle-aged man who returns to his hometown only to find the place and its people are exactly the same as they were in his childhood.

     Our last stop is Washington Street, where my grandfather’s market once stood. It is an empty lot now, paved for parking, and two teenagers are using it to skateboard.

     By the time we leave it is evening. We drive the Vestal Parkway, out of Binghamton, back to Ithaca. Heading home, I turn and watch as the city vanishes in the fading light and think how long it has taken me to make this journey. For so many years after my father died, I was immobilized, paralyzed by grief and the notion of a life without him. But now, now I have walked the streets he walked. I have imagined him walking around corners toward me. I have touched the landmarks of his youth. And although I feel somewhat like an interloper looking backwards into his past, searching for him, I know where he’s been and that to find him I must keep going.

     I think about one of the final scenes in “Walking Distance,” and Martin Sloan’s father’s words to the grown-up version of his son when he tells him he has to leave: “Maybe when you go back, Martin, you’ll find that there are merry-go-rounds and band concerts where you are. Maybe you haven’t been looking in the right place. You’ve been looking behind you, Martin. Try looking ahead.”

     When my father returned from his trips to Binghamton, when he drove back down the road to our cottage and saw my sister and me jumping in delight at his arrival, did he realize he’d come home?

     That this was walking distance after all?