The Big Four-Oh

Baby Nathan comes home from the hospital.

“What are you doing for your birthday?” asked my hairstylist, Jessica, as I sat, masked, in her chair this past Saturday.

“I mean . . .” I began, unsure how to answer.

What do you say? I’d love to have tickets to a concert or an invite out to a hundred of my favorite people to pack my house for a party: I am turning forty tomorrow—July 23. But COVID-19 says no. No revelry at the Tower Theater, no night of bad behavior writ large at the Bunker Club, Picasso Cafe, or my screened-in back porch. On Thursday of this week, I’ll get up, go to work, read my layouts from our upcoming issue of the magazine, and get busy making sure our deadline stays on track. In the evening, I’ll go home, and my husband and I will order a delivery of food from a restaurant I love—as soon as I figure out which restaurant that should be. Nothing all that special.

For Christmas, Brian got me tickets to see David Gray in concert at Blenheim Abbey in Oxfordshire, England. That show was scheduled for June but since has been canceled, as has our trip. Earlier this year, we celebrated our fifteenth anniversary, and the same rules applied: No romantic restaurant meal, no night at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art’s movie theater, no nightcap at Frankie’s or The Pump Bar. We ordered takeout from The Ranch Steakhouse and watched TV.

Nathan at age ten.

The writer Anne Lamott tells the story of a friend who wakes up every morning and prays, “Whatever,” and at the end of every night prays, “Oh well.” These days, I struggle to come up with much better prayers than these. So what am I doing for my birthday? Whatever. Oh well. I wish these were the worst of COVID's effects.

But as I reach forty, I’m ever more comfortable in the uncertainty. At twenty, I anxiously waited for God to come down, wave a wand, and solve all my problems for me—an anxiety that had shifted form but not function by the time I turned thirty. In my thirties, I found good therapists, good doctors, solid friendships, and a deeper connection to my family and Brian than I knew was possible. Unfortunately, this came at the cost of so much tragedy: the more than half-dozen suicides or otherwise sudden deaths of loved ones, health scares, professional challenges, money woes, broken friendships, and the dark, twisty maze of world events that have marked the last decade. There have been times I wanted to curl up in my bed in a fetal position and never leave. A bunch of really wonderful people loved me right through it. Also: antidepressants.

Nathan, age twenty, on the way to Venice from Patras, Greece.

So it would be easy to lose hope on my birthday. Here, at about the halfway point of my life expectancy, it seems like the world might be deteriorating faster than we can lower our standards. This is definitely the case as concerns my physical fitness, at any rate. Between COVID, a long-overdue racial reckoning, a presidential election, an economic disaster, and all manner of other uncertainties parading across our newsfeeds and TV screens, it often feels like we’re buffeted by storms from every direction and whatever progress we’ve made as a species has been in the wrong direction.

But I’ve learned something in four decades: how to plant my feet and turn into the wind. Maybe it was that prairie growing up, where you learn to keep your head down and wait out the drought. I once interviewed a Panhandle farmer who told me his granddad had farmed their land for fifty-five years, and he only ever got five good crops.

30-year-old Nathan at the Oklahoma State Fair. Photo by Greg Elwell

“What kept him going?” I asked.

The farmer smiled.

“Those five good crops,” he said.

I’ve learned—especially over the last decade—to look for the good crops and wait out the bad. I used to think every problem that arose was It—The End. If I faced challenges, after all, it must be because I deserved them and was, by all logic, not a good person. My thirties taught me, as the Buddhists say, not to take my life too personally.

Nathan Gunter, Oklahoma Today Editor in Chief, at a day away from forty.

At forty, I find myself less interested in nursing grudges and more into nurturing this bright little spark of hope that has survived four decades in this body, in this beautiful and weird and sometimes unbearably sad life. What am I doing for my birthday, you ask? I don’t know. Believing.

Written By

Nathan Gunter

A sixth-generation Oklahoman, Weatherford native, and Westmoore High School graduate, Nathan Gunter is the magazine's editor-in-chief. When he's not editor-in-chiefing, Nate enjoys live music, running, working out, gaming, cooking, and random road trips with no particular destination in mind. He holds degrees from Wake Forest University and the University of Oklahoma. He learned how to perform poetry from Maya Angelou; how to appreciate Italian art from Terisio Pignatti; comedy writing from Doug Marlette; how to make coconut cream pie from his great-grandma; and how not to approach farm dogs from trial and error. A seminary dropout, he lives just off Route 66 in Oklahoma City.