EDITOR’S NOTE: This monthly column by author and teacher Joe Gannon of Northampton debuts today. 

A walk into town – especially if you’re looking for inspiration for your first column and your wily editor has suggested you “introduce yourself a little” – well, a walk into town can be a dalliance with things unseen.

Such a stroll begins at Sheldon Field, near the Fairgrounds. It’s a ramble I first made when Ronald Reagan was president. (And that was so long ago The Man we once decried as the original Wicked Witch of American politics is now nostalgically knocked as more a quasi-benign, if bumbling, Glinda, compared to the Flying Monkeys swarming our electoral skies, threatening to deport Toto and build a wall around Munchkin land.) Back then I was still mostly the soldier Uncle Sam had recently discharged so my gait was much faster and longer than it is now, which is why I never used to stop and watch, being in too much of a hurry to get into town and be part of the scene back then.

I left the Valley and wandered three continents for 21 years, before coming back to raise my kid. And as luck would have it, I eventually wound up living across the street from Sheldon.

Now it’s my favorite place to go when I need to recover perspective. From the top step near the bus stop you can look across the field to the airport beyond and on to Skinner Mountain, brilliantly lit when the sun is in the west, and the hilltops seem like nothing but rolling breakers in a petrified ocean.

When some new horror from the mouth of a gun or a politician threatens to overturn my equilibrium I’ll go there and watch a girls’ softball game, a dad hitting grounders to his kids and their friends, or just the wind blowing over the snow – to remind myself that this is life, this is why we are here, this is what living is: nature, neighbors, home.

Of course, I’ve also had a long love-hate relationship with “Paradise City” (and was given this column despite, not because of it). So when some new mundanity or inanity out of the mouth of some over-privileged duffer in this bourgeois burg threatens that same equilibrium, I go back to Sheldon Field to remind myself that this is not all the life there is. But a refuge tucked behind the invisible Tofu Wall.

I recall at those times that violence, strife and scarcity are also life – not the nightly news we ingest from afar, but most people’s daily bread, and that this beautiful park spread out below me might one day be the globally warmed high water mark for the Connecticut River when my brilliant, truculent teenager is as old as I am now, and I am no longer here to protect her, or even share the misery.

And so on a trek into town, I find myself searching for the evidence of things unseen.

I am of that insufferable generation that knew Northampton in “The Halcyon Days” of the 1980s, so I can be like a refugee visiting home long after a tsunami has washed it all away: Here once stood the colossal Sheehan’s, there the inimitable Rahar’s. How far the Great have fallen! The twin tributaries of an unseen river into which I can no longer step have been replaced by retailers hawking yoga pants and noodles.

But nostalgia is a fool’s errand that leads nowhere – much like Donald Trump’s candidacy. But that’s another column.

If I look at this town, this Valley, through the eyes of my daughter – at 13 a social justice champion for non-binary, queer, transgendered rights – I find evidence of other things unseen. Hamp is the only town she’s ever known, it is home for her in a way it never was for me.

Rather than the precious, over-gentrified shopping destination I see, she shows me a hot house of freedom that gifts her soil, sun and room enough to grow as straight or as bent as she wants. And that is no small thing when I listen to my transgendered colleague talk about growing up in North Carolina where she had to bloody or be bloodied every day of her life until  she fled here as well.

And so, as I finish my ramble across the street from the Academy of Music, I find evidence of something I had, until now, neither seen nor expected: I, too, am home.

Joe Gannon of Northampton is a teacher and novelist. His Gazette column will appear monthly. His latest novel, “The Last Dawn,” is available at Broadside. He can be reached at darevjdg@gmail.com.