In Spanish, mariposa means butterfly.

No, my title is not about the Mariposa diner on Magsaysay Steet, the main drag in Olongapo when the town across the bridge from the U.S. Navy’s Subic Bay Naval Base was the closest thing to Fiddler’s Green that has ever been.

Some of us Navy folks might have experienced a wild night or several wild nights out in that crazy place. However, one of our favorite pastimes in Subic was to walk out of the Naval Base main gate, cross the bridge over “shit river” and watch in amazement as sailors tossed coins into the filthy waters and Filipino young boys dive off of the small skiffs or the bridge itself to retrieve the coins. From there, Mike Peck, Pete Toennies, Al Pavich, OW Wright, and i would walk down Magsaysay roughly a half mile and enter the Mariposa diner. The small open-air restaurant was below street level. The few rickety tables offered a great view of the street. Across Magsaysay was the Wagon Wheel, a bar with many women and where sailors flocked for fun and…

In the Mariposa, we each would order a half-pint of rum made up in the mountains to the north. i believe the rum maker was “Pine Castle.” We would add a coke and ice. The serving cost seven pesos. The ice was four of those pesos. The rum and coke was three pesos.

There, we would watch the show. The shore patrol’s paddy wagon would cruise up and down Magsaysay. They would frequently spot a hungover or drunk sailor, often with only part of his uniform still attached. The shore patrol would corner the sailor and proceed to the paddy wagon with the sailor attempting to get away. Often his attempt was abetted by a young woman who would emerge from the Wagon Wheel or another bar and start swinging wildly at the shore patrol until the SP’s managed to get the sailor in the back of the paddy wagon and lock the door.

It was a grand show to watch while sipping our rum and cola under the old, rusting service tray, which had been painted and hung on the wall. We all admired that tray and thought it was hilarious.

On one such occasion, we were talking when i revealed it was my birthday (January 19, 1970). Mike Peck went up to the proprietor behind the bar. When he came back, the group had kicked in a couple of dollars to buy the tray. It was my birthday present. i wanted to hang it in my home office but Maureen put her foot down. The sign now hangs in my briar patch, my garage work shop and escape from reality.

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But that “Mariposa,” aka butterfly, is not what i was thinking about.

i was thinking about Bob Lind’s 1965 song “Elusive Butterfly of Love.” Thank you, Dr. Bill Holland.

You see, i came under the spell of an amazing man, the aforementioned Dr. Holland when i began my real journey from my misspent scholarship courtesy of the Navy and two glorious years at Vanderbilt. i went from a very poor engineering student to a hard working three-job, commuting student at Middle Tennessee State University choosing to pursue a Bachelor of Arts in English, something very rare at that time. In fact, i think i was the first student to get a BA degree in English as nearly all English majors were pursuing a BS degree to become teachers.

So i wandered with great wonderment through every level of capability in professors, loving it, punching my tickets for non-English requirements, and wallowing in my deep adoration of literature. Primed with my experience of Dr. Scott Peck and his Shakespeare course, i fell under the spell of Bill Holland. We became friends and i would skip other classes to wander with him across campus and to his office where we would wander further off Romantic Literature and Wordsworth and Robert Penn Warren to investigate the then new idea of Atlantis being in the Aegean, not the Atlantic, and symbolism and hidden meanings of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.”

Eventually, we got around to Bob Lind’s “Elusive Butterfly of Love.” Now, that’s the mariposa that caused me to start this post.

The lyrics:

You might wake up some mornin’
To the sound of something moving past your window in the wind
And if you’re quick enough to rise
You’ll catch a fleeting glimpse of someone’s fading shadow
Out on the new horizon
You may see the floating motion of a distant pair of wings
And if the sleep has left your ears
You might hear footsteps running through an open meadow

Don’t be concerned, it will not harm you
It’s only me pursuing somethin’ I’m not sure of
Across my dreams with nets of wonder
I chase the bright elusive butterfly of love

You might have heard my footsteps
Echo softly in the distance through the canyons of your mind
I might have even called your name
As I ran searching after something to believe in
You might have seen me runnin’
Through the long-abandoned ruins of the dreams you left behind
If you remember something there
That glided past you followed close by heavy breathin’

Don’t be concerned, it will not harm you
It’s only me pursuing somethin’ I’m not sure of
Across my dreams with nets of wonder
I chase the bright elusive butterfly of love

Across my dreams with nets of wonder
I chase the bright elusive butterfly of love.

i know we arrived at about a half-dozen hypotheses and never settled on one deeper meaning of that song. But our discussions covered a wide breadth of connections from biblical, history, literature, and even math. i learned so much from Dr. Bill Holland and forever will be grateful.

Then, reminiscing about my halcyon wanderings from seventy-nine years ago, i reexamined “Elusive Butterfly of Love.”

It seems to me i chased that damn elusive mariposa for about twenty-eight years. i have loved women since somewhere on the south side of puberty. i loved so many who will never know of that amore i had for them. Many will. It was easy for me to love, almost a curse. As Bobby Moore and the Rhythm Aces put it, i was “Searching, Searching, Baby, for my love.” But the love i sought was fleeting, elusive. It didn’t stick. i loved them then; i love them now. But they found all sorts of reasons to not love me. i suspect my going to sea might have had some impact in many of those cases.

But in my late thirties, i told that mariposa of love to take a hike. i was done, burnt out. i decided a single man was what i wanted to be for the rest of my life. i wanted to love women, but i wanted my (and their) independence.

So being the goofy guy, i met this woman. Come the end of July, we will have been married 42 years. She remains gorgeous while i have wandered to old bald man silliness. Yet, she loves me.

And that, my friends, is the best thing that has happened to me.

You see, that friggin’ elusive mariposa of amar ended up in my net.

The last of us are a fading breed. Perhaps there are some groups of old men somewhere who are like us, but they, like us, i fear, are fading as well. i am pretty sure there are not that many men younger than us (and that’s not too young, mind you) who have our characteristics.

We think our bunch of guys are unique. We grew up in a world different from now. Our parents had seen the First World War, the depression, World War II. America with all of its faults, was still an incredibly wonderful place in which to grow up. We played outside. We bought bubblegum with baseball player cards to stick in our bicycle spokes so the bike would sound like a motor bike (not) when we pedaled. We walked to school by ourselves. We listened to radio with Fibber McGee and Molly, The Great Gildersleeve. Tex Ritter. Fred Allen, Gang Busters until television came along with oaters, The Mickey Mouse Show, Andy’s Gang with Midnight Cat demanding “Plunk Your Magic Twanger, Froggy.” We went fishing in creeks with rope stringers to carry our catch. We hunted squirrels and rabbits with .410 shotguns, graduating to .12 gauge shotguns. We played ball, all kinds, without supervision on vacant fields.

We went to school and chased girls for fun for several years before chasing them for dates and first kisses and wearing our letter sweaters, and hoping for something a bit more.

We reluctantly did our homework and many went to college. Then we went to “our war” as my good friend and OCS roommate, Doc Jarden, called it. It wasn’t our choice, but it was our responsibility, our duty as it had been for our fathers. Some of us actually found it a good life and stayed in. i actually got out and got back in from financial necessity even though there were many other options. i loved the sea.

And we grew up and went to our own war — well, it wasn’t really ours, and we didn’t really want to go, but we wished to be good citizens, we complied and went (while others resisted their responsibility to their country in various ways for various reasons).

And then we retired (or actually “completed our active duty service”) on pensions that would not completely sustain us; so, we went to work after “retirement.”

We played sports until we couldn’t because of age or injury. And we ended up playing golf, a lot of golf. It became a passion. We played every week and added to our group.

After each round, we would gather around pitchers of beer and tell stories and opine about the sad state of the world today. Our group became semi-famous at the North Island Naval Air Station’s golf course, “Sea ‘n Air.” We would sit and laugh and cuss — man, you don’t get a bunch of Navy and Army guys together without barrels of profanity — and we gave each other hell. It was a sport and we laughed.

We prided ourselves on being “assholes” and even found being called one had become a compliment. We realized we were a lot like Statler and Waldorf, the two curmudgeons on Sesame Street. We adopted the title for our group: Curmudgeons. We brought our wives into the gang and would meet every year for at least one or two dinners.

Several years ago, we began to harass one of our members, Pete Toennies, a retired Navy SEAL captain, about never hosting one of our dinners. So Pete accepted the challenge and invited us to his home on Coronado. During one of our conversations before the grand occasion, Pete and i produced the idea of making Marty Linville the honorary head of the bunch. A title was created and Pete came up with the idea of a fez for the group head — being true curmudgeons, i claim and Pete claims we were the original coiner of the title — but Pete took action, acquired a fez and had the title sewn onto the headgear. He rewarded Marty at the party with the fez.

It read “Ancient Order of the Curmudgeons” across the top and arching across the bottom was “Grand Whiner.”

Marty loved it and wore it proudly. He later bragged when he and his wife Linda went on a church trip to Turkey, he wore his fez

It was fitting. Marty stories are legendary. i’ve captured several of them here. He was one of the nicest guys in the world…in his own way. He was everyone’s best friend. And he could be as nasty as was required if the situation called for it, sometimes when it didn’t.

If you read my posts, you already know Marty passed away last July, fittingly the day after Independence Day. i miss him terribly. So does everyone else in our group of Curmudgeons. Before we begin our pitchers of beer every week after our round of golf, we raise a toast to Marty.

The group for the annual dinners has become four couples from the maximum of eight. At the last dinner, three of the four curmudgeons wondered if Linda still had the fez. Rod Stark, who was also from Kansas like Marty, and who had known him longer than all of us including me, said Linda had given the fez to him. We decided to elect the next Grand Whiner. To my surprise, the other three voted for me unanimously. i accepted but inside i was a bit upset. i thought the other three were more curmudgeonly than me. Then i realized being upset was something a true curmudgeon would do.

i consider the honorary position an honor. After all, that means i am at least a bit like Marty.

All four of us have problems associated with old age, Navy service, and some pretty wild living, not to mention diets that would make health experts blanch. In not so many years, we will be gone as happens to all old men.

i don’t think there will be any like us following in our footsteps. The world has changed. For example, i don’t think any of us ever had long hair. i know none of us had or have tattoos. We danced with our ladies, never in a Mosh Pit.

That is not to say the folks coming after us are bad, just different. i like the way we were better. i just don’t think folks coming after us will be like us.

And i guarantee there will never be anyone like Marty Linville, the original Grand Whiner of the Ancient Order of the Curmudgeons.

the dark descends
it is the way of the day
it is the way of life
it is a fact:
dark descends
i sit in the dark of the deep evening
i smile,
remembering when
the dark was defeated
by the flashlight’s red lens
allowing the mariner to not lose
night vision
to scan the horizon
to find landmarks
to guide our ship home
in the wee hours of age
i sit in the dark
smiling in my understanding
of the dark.