This is a particularly poignant commemoration this year, since we lost David Lynch last month. I think my kid is still mourning a bit.

Twin Peaks Day is celebrated today because  it is the day when FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper first shows up on the scene and basically kicks off the show.

Apparently there is still a celebration every year in Snoqualmie and North Bend, where the show was filmed. It’s like a TwinCon, with panels and screenings and so on. (It was held over the weekend this year, but I didn’t see any news stories about the turnout.

I don’t have any personal behind-the-scenes ties to the show, but I absolutely loved it when it first aired. I was working at a campus coffeehouse called Café Vieni Vieni (which we all called Café Come Come if we were feeling clean-minded and altering the spelling if we were not), and my friend Chad recommended it after the first episode (which I missed, and had to wait several months to see). He and I talked a lot anyway, but the show gave us even more to discuss as we dished up cookies and dumped dead coffee grounds. I don’t think I’ve ever laughed harder on the job than I did that semester. Chad, who hailed from the Northwest, told me hilarious things about Washington, and how some things in the show veered closer to Actual Reality than Surreality. He also explained a lot of the more esoteric aspects of the Lynch universe that I was only dimly aware of.

My roommate, a rich bitch from La Jolla, also fell in love with the show and bought up all the related things she could find—the soundtrack, Laura Palmer’s diary, clothing; I’m pretty sure she even got herself a stuffed owl. My dad would postpone his weekly phone call from Florida (long-distance was expensive back then!) until after the show had aired so we could discuss it. My BFF from high school, who had stayed in Florida, would watch it with him and my mom every week. She and I both benefited from my dad explaining the back story of all the actors in the show—I had never seen West Side Story and had no idea that Benjamin Horne and Dr. Jacoby had beef. (It was even longer before I found out that Ben’s brother was the bottle-clanker in The Warriors, which I guess my dad never saw.)

This was also a show you almost had to love to keep watching. I could be wrong about this, but it felt like ABC really made you work for it by switching the air times; it didn’t air at the same time every week for what felt like a huge chunk of its short run. When the second season ended with two episodes in summer (after being on hiatus since spring), it was almost a relief despite the infuriating cliffhanger.

I was excited to hear a movie was coming out. I was disappointed when I learned it was a prequel and not a vehicle to tie up loose ends. (I still went to see it and enjoyed it.)

Life went on, and after Netflix was invented, I went through a spell in the late 2000s of binging old shows that I remembered as being good. Early Dr. Who. Buffy. X Files. Twin Peaks. Quantum Leap. I watched these on my own, for the most part. The hubs didn’t care, and my kid bored easily. The only one of those shows to get my kid’s attention was the last one, which is a different blog post.

When the third season came out, I just sort of assumed that it wouldn’t answer any questions. Plus, we didn’t have Showtime, so I blew it off. But a few years later, stuck at home during “the pando” as my kid calls it, we watched the whole shebang again, from Pilot to end of Season 3. My husband found it “extremely weird and mildly entertaining,” but my kid—who by now was a big Lynch fan—was entranced. He even decided doughnuts were worth eating, which was maddeningly late in life and would have made road trips a lot easier if he’d been indoctrinated earlier. But I suspect, given the advantages he had of a movie-intensive upbringing, he had a greater appreciation of the whole experience as a first run than I’d had.

It’s sort of funny to me that a TV show had such a sustained influence on my life. I really didn’t watch much TV until my late 20s—for a long time we didn’t have a TV, then I had to fight with my parents for screen time, then I worked nights. But some things definitely stuck, and I’m glad Twin Peaks was one of them.

(And for the record, I checked, and the Hooters-like breast-aurant chain named Twin Peaks has nothing to do with the show. So don’t add that to your list of Lynch-related must-sees.)