Thursday, June 25, 2009 | by nathan

Streaks on the China

Now that I get home an hour after Brian does, I often come home to find him playing Wii in the living room. Imagine my delight to come home the other night to find him about to complete a puzzle on the mid-1980s video game edition of Wheel! Of! Fortune!, especially since I not only got to yell out "MISTER BELVEDERE!" really loud, but also to start up singing the theme song, which I remember very, very well, thank you:

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 | by nathan

Bridging The Gap

This post is a part of the Bridging The Gap Synchroblog, wherein over 50 bloggers try to answer the question, "How can we embody mutual honour and respect in our conversations and relationships with those with whom we may disagree on the topic of homosexuality?”

As a writer, I regularly find myself irretrievably mired in some writerly muck or other, stymied by some untenable next plot point or struggling to overcome some barrier of language. More often than not I come to these roadblocks because I have written myself into a corner, or into a nice, crazy frenzy. I think that this is paydirt for Jesus. I think that when I get all good and frustrated is when Jesus rolls up his sleeves, rubs his hands together and says, "Good. Let’s get to work." 

They say that you can’t heal your own sick mind with your own sick mind, and so when I’ve reached some crazy-making bad place with my writing, I get up. I push back from the desk, stand up, and get out of my own head space for a little bit. I walk the dog. I weed the garden. I think of these as my "lifelines;" I phone a friend. I bake something. Then, if I find that I’m out of the rhythm of writing, I start by writing a letter to someone I haven’t seen in too long. I step back in, slowly, carefully, playfully.

Case in point: this is my fourth draft of a piece for the Bridging The Gap Synchroblog. Since my last draft I stood up, walked around in the summer sun, went to get some lunch.

Those of us on either side of this supposed "divide" over homosexuality can often feel like we’re beating our heads against a wall. Stubborn and convinced we’ve got something to prove, a mission to accomplish, we plant our feet and go at it, hurdling arguments across this great yawning chasm like cannonballs. "You’re trying to justify sinful behavior!" "You’re ignoring the Bible’s message of radical acceptance!" 

I don’t know how we reconcile our theologies of sexuality together. Maybe we don’t. But here’s what we can do: we can stand up, step away, and get out of this space for awhile. You can go ahead and think I’m wrong, and I can go ahead and think you’re wrong, and maybe in the meantime we can go feed the poor together. Maybe we can get together and take a carful of groceries to a hungry family. Then, if that goes well, perhaps we could go register some people to vote. If that turns out to be a minefield, then it’s okay; we just hit the reset button and find something else productive to do - cleaning up our neighborhoods, our shared space. Help some latchkey kids with their math homework. Volunteer at a food bank.

Let’s start there. Let’s leave our little verbal bombs and facial tics at home and just go do something good, together, that has nothing to do with this thing we think makes us enemies. Let’s promise not to browbeat each other, just for today. I’ll bring a sack lunch if you’ll bring some water, and we’ll work to alleviate just a tiny little soupçon of suffering, just for today.

I think what we’ll find is that we share more than we think. We share a basic faith in the value of showing up, for one, because at the end of the day it seems we will have done something. We share a faith in God, and we call that God Jesus, and, as Rich Mullins said, "If faith is all we’ve got then maybe faith is all we need." We’ll have dirt on our faces and sweat on our backs. We’ll have the sandwiches and the water, and this thing that we will have built - this good work, conceived together. Those things will be our sacraments, the holy things we share. Those will be our bridge. You can go live on your side of the "gap," and I’ll live on mine, but I’ll bring sandwiches if you’ll bring some water, and we won’t keep the world waiting for us to agree on this one thing before we do something amazing together.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 | by nathan

Pink and Blue

Sometimes, in order to get a good photo, you have to lay down on a scalding hot sidewalk in 100+ degree heat. This will probably get you some strange looks from people walking past but is a great way to prove that your dedication to the craft is total and complete.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 | by nathan

Story Of Our Own*

My dad came up this weekend for Father’s Day, bringing with him an old photo album.

His mother gave him this photo album for Christmas in 1978, less than two months before she died in February 1979. I was born in July 1980 and have spent my life hearing stories about my dad’s mom, Clara Mae, and have always been disappointed that I never got to meet her. The fact that she and I never met, and yet that I always felt very close to her, is part of what fueled my belief in Heaven from a very, very early age, because though we never met I always felt she was near, and that someday I’d get to see her.

This is Clara Mae:

That’s her and my grandfather, Joe Nathan, my namesake. He died just before I turned 6 years old.

This is my dad. He grew up in Hackett, Arkansas:

Though to be honest, if I’d been handed this photograph, I might have thought it was my younger brother:

Ohhhhhh, he’s gonna kick my ass for putting that photograph on the internet. So, to be fair, here’s this:

That would be me. That photo actually appears on one side of my new freelance business cards, because, apparently, I have lost my mind.

Boy, this blog post ended up in a different place than it started out in.

So, Joe Nathan, the guy I’m named after? This is a photo of his grandparents and their children.

I love the 19th-century metadata at the bottom of the photo; I might never have known that this was taken in Grangeville, Idaho, at the Elite Studio. The handsomely mustachioed man is Joel T. Gunter, who is Joe Nathan’s grandfather (my older brother is named Joel as well). His wife was Minta Dolan; she was one-half Cherokee but her last name is an Irish one. I knew I had some Irish in me. Joel was born March 29, 1861 and died in 1943. Minta was born on September 26, 1862 and died in 1930. They were married November 20, 1881.

The tall boy in the back is Nathan, like me; we have the same first and last name, and he passed his name on to his son, who then passed it on to me. Nathan was born on January 3, 1883 and died January 14, 1938, when my dad, his grandson, was not yet 3 years old. Also, do you know what’s weird? I have always been FASCINATED by Idaho, and have wanted to visit there since I was small. I never have, but now that I have this connection I have even more reason to.

Ever since my dad let me keep the photo album for a few days to get some of these pictures scanned I’ve become utterly fascinated by my family’s history. Just in the 36 or so hours since Father’s Day I have come across a wealth - a fecundity - of information about my roots, and I’m going to be posting a little more about it as the days roll on. It’s really fascinating stuff, and I’d love to hear any of my readers’ family histories in the comments. Come on, people, I know you’ve got some good stuff in those genes! Let it out!

*Post title comes from a great new song by K.C. Clifford that she wrote for this film.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009 | by nathan

Fuzzy

That this photo of one of my purple hydrangeas is ever so slightly out of focus bugs me to no end, I can’t even tell you, because other than that I think it’s great. But that’s sort of like saying, well, my house is on fire but at least all the dishes are clean. Anyway, I’ve been trying over the years to get my hydrangeas to turn purple, or even blue, and I am told that my meager application of pecan shells a couple years ago won’t suffice; the pecannage of this flower bed needs to be near-constant. Error discovered, and [soon to be] corrected.

Monday, June 22, 2009 | by nathan

Glass Mountains

I just turned in a story about some of northwestern Oklahoma’s most interesting geological marvels, including the Glass/Gloss Mountain Area, and I included this photo with the story. It’s one of the coolest hikes/nature walks you could take in Oklahoma, so if you’re looking for a neat day trip, I highly recommend it.

Friday, June 19, 2009 | by nathan

Untouched

The other day I had a little mini-rant about how people who think Photoshop is cheating are - well, they’re jerks, to be quite frank. That said, sometimes nature and the sun do all the work. This is one of the wonderful bloodred lilies that come up every year in our backyard, and this photograph is completely untouched. I ran it through a few of my little Photoshop routines, but each time I felt I had taken something away from the photo rather than adding to it. God did all the work here; I just managed to sit still for 1/500th of a second and capture it.

Thursday, June 18, 2009 | by nathan

Having Lost My Mind, Please Point Me To The Nearest Microphone

I think I have completely lost my mind as a writer.

Or at least, I have completely lost my bearings. In the last two years I had become somewhat disillusioned with freelance writing, telling friends often that if I wasn’t trying to make a living at it then it really wasn’t worth my time. And this bears out, to a degree - the money that I make as a freelancer never really justified the work. In addition, the nice little mixed grill of shyness, social awkwardness and stage fright that composes a large part of my personality always makes interviewing people, even over the phone, a turn-off. My first job was as a telemarketer, and every time I call someone to do an interview, I am immediately back there, in my mind, with the pushy script and irritable customers whose dinner I have interrupted with my inanity.

What makes interviewing worthwhile is that once my subject and I are off and rolling, I find the whole thing really enjoyable, especially when he or she is teling me things that I can actually picture between quote marks, in print. And then, once I’m writing and I look up and see that I’ve become so invested in my subject that time has started to pass in a vacuum and I’m two hundred words past what my editor has limited me to - two hundred words I’m excited to have written, well.

So last year when I conceived The Great Oklahoma Road Trip I thought it would make good blog filler. Earlier this year I realized that I could have a potential audience of around 55,000 or so for those pieces, 55,000 people I could share these wonderful places in this state I love so much with, I got really excited. I pitched it to my editor, and he got really excited, and every time I would turn in a piece to him he’d write back some nice little note thanking me for my contribution.

Then he asked me to do a story on very small cattle, sort of out of the blue, and when I first saw his pitch I thought, "Oh, God no." But something took over my hands and here I was writing him back saying, sure I’ll take it. It was money, after all, and I can always use it, especially now that I seem to be leaving the country two weeks from this Sunday. Then he asked me to pitch him some stories for the Gay Pride issue, and I pitched two. Then, I had a great idea and pitched another one. And so help me God, I’m having a blast doing it all. I’ve even learned to enjoy interviewing people, and have made a couple new friends in the process, AND to connect with a few old ones. ME! Enjoying things! Making friends! HOLY CRAP WHO IS THIS PERSON.

So in the meantime I’ve been trying to get my shit together to write a book. I’ve had some serious therapy sessions with myself, with some fellow artisticky types, and with my husband, God bless his poor heart, and I’ve realized that my stage fright actually extends into people whom I can’t see and don’t know reading words I have written about feelings that I have. Publishing terrifies me, and so I’ve decided that the way to combat it is to get my fraidy ass out there and read some stuff in public. This thought is slightly less terrifying to me than setting myself on fire, and yet slightly more incumbent than coming out was, so I think it’s the next right move. Someone please plan to join me and please, for the love of God, bring some Ativan. I’ll let you know once I set something up, but in the meantime, let’s all do our Lamaze together. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, Breathe out.

Now, commence freaking out.

Thursday, June 18, 2009 | by nathan

White Face, White Ground

So, I battled a really, really severe case of seasonal affective disorder this February and March, and on into April and May really, because winter really, really held on this year. And I made a deal with God that I would not complain when temperatures reached in to the triple-digits once summer arrived. Well, yesterday the heat index in Oklahoma City was 108 (THANKS, GLOBAL WARMING!), even though summer hasn’t *technically* arrived. So, not a complaint, I just wanted to post this photograph of Sam in the snow because of how cute it is. SEE HOW CUTE?

Wednesday, June 17, 2009 | by nathan

Heavy Laden

I was out in the garden with my camera when this giant bumblebee came flying past me, his wings beating like crazy to keep him aloft. He was about to fall out of the sky because of all that pollen piled up on his legs. I mean, check that stuff out, that big orange blog hanging off the side of him. He seriously was having a ton of trouble flying. Normally I try to sort of usher these guys off toward the garden to make sure that all of my vegetables get amply pollinated, but I was sure that if I did that he would just - bloop! - hit the pavement. He looked like a remote controlled helicopter.