When my dad and I take our daily walk on the Tiasquam Valley trail in Chilmark, he complains about his ankle. My entire life I have been hearing about that ankle, never the same since he played in an Island Cup game in the hazy Vineyard ’80s of his boyhood.

When he ran the Boston Marathon, his ankle bothered him. When he did the Pan Mass Challenge, his ankle bothered him. When he moved me into my college dorm, his ankle bothered him.

My dad is my link to the Island. He grew up here, but moved off-Island as an adult and with my mother raised my brothers and me on the mainland. He is the bestower of the last name that triggers a pause from seasoned locals from Oak Bluffs to Aquinnah. I am, in fact, Jimmy Dario’s daughter. Ordering takeout or filling up my gas tank or covering an event for the Vineyard Gazette — where I am a reporting intern this summer — I encounter people who knew him way back when. I get told countless stories about his performance in high school history class, of the parties he went to in Menemsha, of his acumen as a baseball catcher and of the summer he directed traffic in Edgartown.

There are gulfs in our dispositions and interests. He is a rabid football fan; I did not know the Super Bowl was happening this year until he told me that day. He listens to little other than the Grateful Dead; I plug my ears when he puts on their satellite radio station. He just subscribed to a meat delivery service; I try to introduce my parents to the wonders of oat milk and ancient grains. His ideal summer day is fishing out on our boat; my ideal day is reading under an umbrella on the beach.

But the thread that links us more closely than anything else is our shared connection to the Vineyard. He takes four hours to watch Jaws, pausing every two seconds to point out some old classmate or neighbor. He constantly texts me listings of oceanfront properties we cannot afford. He rants to me about select board politics and over-development. He suggested I apply for the Gazette reporting internship.

Over my 16 weeks with the Gazette this summer, I spent many days at the office on Summer street in Edgartown. In one of the paper’s two clipping libraries (called the morgue in newspaper parlance) Islanders from the 175 years of coverage are categorized by name. A few weeks ago, I was perusing through the archives for a feature I was writing. As I flipped through the alphabetically categorized manila envelopes looking for someone relevant to my piece, I ran into something unsuspected — my father’s folder.

I pulled out the neatly gathered articles, likely not touched since they were placed there by a long-retired librarian. Spread out on my desk were notices of my parents’ engagement, of my dad’s college graduation, of a 2004 car accident I had never heard of.

The folder struck me, prompting an afternoon of digging‚ despite the fact that I was on deadline. In the most self-absorbed childlike way, I had never really considered my dad being in the Gazette, even though he had grown up here and I had spent the first month of my internship covering the regional high school’s senior class. The Gazette had felt like my adventure, something I was doing on my own. One story hit me harder than any other — the Island Cup coverage from 1981. Right in the middle of the article, there it was, a breach in the space-time continuum.

“The team was at midfield and Captain Jim Dario was called to run on the next play. It turned out to be his last play of the game: he suffered a broken ankle and was taken to the hospital.”

My father and his ankle, in my paper. All those repeated recollections every year at Thanksgiving, all that ankle tape, all those insoles three inches thick — here was the origin story, neatly articulated in the Island’s paper of record.

A window opened and a sense of legacy overtook me. On this Island, my dad broke his ankle as a 17-year-old, and intrepid Gazette reporter Anne Carmichael recorded it. Now, on this same Island, he walks on that shaky ankle and his 21-year-old daughter has become that intrepid Gazette reporter. Our Vineyard stories aren’t disparate; they are continuous.

My father turned 57 on Tuesday, August 24. His birthday is the Vineyard — it is Scottish Bakehouse cakes and flowers from roadside stands and North Atlantic seafood.

I drove around the Island that afternoon, the sunlight overhead making the water along Beach Road glitter. At the Big Bridge, I watched the masses step up and leap over the railing into the water below and thought of all the times I had done the same — with my brothers, my cousins, my friends, my father. I thought of the Island he had given me and all he had taught me — how to body surf the rough waves at Long Point, how to get the brass ring at the Flying Horses, how to correctly pronounce “quahaug.”

I submerged myself in the moment, my windows down and playing my music a little too loud, and I thought of my father as a boy, doing the same.