Caterpillars and Eagles

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

A great advantage we fathers have when dispensing advice to our young daughters about dating and men is that we often have been, in a past life, the very fellows our female offspring find so vexing. Empowered with this self-awareness, I have counseled tearful daughters and their female friends that most young men are caterpillars until about age 25, and often butterflies thereafter.

I have nothing against caterpillars. I was one. They are wonderful, fascinating, and even necessary creatures. They also are perpetually hungry, largely self-centered, and mostly single-minded larvae—hardly the ideal long-term companions for the garden of life.

For a young man in his early 20s, the world is a fascinating and frightening place, rife with new freedoms and opportunities of all sorts to be probed, tasted, analyzed, and understood. Along with those endless possibilities and new horizons there are uncertainties and challenges that we find, usually subconsciously, daunting to our not-quite-fully-developed frontal cortexes.

I remember those years—roughly ages 21 to 24—quite well. I had very little or no money. Saturday lunch often coincided with free sample day at the local grocery store. Everything I owned fit into my old secondhand car, which had at best a 50/50 chance of starting when I put the key into the ignition. This lovable but unreliable clunker was unlikely to pass its next annual state inspection. In winter, I staved off the inevitable (and unaffordable) expense of inspection failure by packing snow on my front windshield to conceal the expired sticker there.

For most of this time, I was in law school at the University of Utah. For two years, I shared a small two bedroom apartment in Salt Lake City with my good friend Marc Dominguez, an old high school classmate enrolled in U’s business college. We also shared a common outlook on life.

Some days we rose early, worked hard, and checked items off our chore lists, things like grocery shopping, bathroom cleaning duty, study time, etc. Other days we slept until noon, the aftermath of a late night debate about the important questions of life. One typical bone of contention—who was greater, the inventor of the regular dome or the geodesic dome? 

Highlighting any of our caterpillar weeks was a late night trip to Bill and Nada’s, a now-defunct 24-hour throwback downtown diner. We loved that eggs and brains were on the menu, but we never ordered them. Instead, we picked out songs from the table top juke boxes and spun out conspiracy theories about why Bill was always at the diner, but no one ever saw Nada. We laughed loudly at—but silently acknowledged the near-universal truth of—the joke from comedian Rodney Dangerfield about being terrified during his first sexual experience. “After all,” Rodney said, “I was all alone.”

We partied too, once inviting a wide cross section of friends—law school buddies, nurses, business students, and everything in between—to a daiquiri bash. All set to go at 8 pm with three blenders and plenty of fruit but no guests, we worried no one would show. Two hours later you could hear our crowded ruckus three blocks away (belated apologies to the neighbors). By midnight, I stood in the kitchen, fruitless, and staring at exhausted and empty blenders and rum bottles. So, I invented the frozen broccoli tequila daiquiri. The festivities abruptly ended.

Intriguing as they sound now, none of these events were the defining moment of this time of life. That happened one autumn evening, when we had no plans to do anything. It was a Friday night, and we both were girlfriend-less. This was rare for Marc, not so much for me. We just stayed in, drank Jack Daniels, and played cards. For a soundtrack, Marc’s record stereo played my album: The Eagles—Their Greatest Hits (1971–1975).

Their Greatest Hits was the Eagles’ initial compilation album, first released in 1976 but a best-selling classic by the time we were enjoying it almost a decade later. It includes hits from the band’s first four albums. Don Henley was unhappy that the songs were made nonsensical when lifted out of their original context. On the night Marc and I listened to it, however, the album seemed custom made to address the state of caterpillar male lives.

“Lyin’ Eyes” pinpointed our young man boyish exuberance for life. (“On the other side of town a boy is waiting, with fiery eyes and dreams no one could steal.”) On the other hand, “Take it Easy” captured the confusing challenges accompanying that exuberance. (“Well, I’m a-runnin’ down the road, tryin’ to loosen my load, I’ve got seven women on my mind, four that want to own me, two that want to stone me, one said she’s a friend of mine.”)

The rhythmic “Peaceful Easy Feeling” expressed our youthful unrequited longing for love and intimacy. (“I want to sleep with you in the desert night, with a billion stars all around.”) The mournful “Tequila Sunrise,” however, explained our reality. (“Ev’ry night when the sun goes down, just another lonely boy in town.”)

The mellow “Best of My Love” revealed our evolving soon-to-be-all-grown-up perspectives. (“Beautiful faces, loud empty places, look at the way that we live. Wastin’ our time on cheap talk and wine, left us so little to give.”) And “Desperado” offered some of the best advice we could possibly get for future relationships. (“Don’t you draw the queen of diamonds, boy, she’ll beat you if she’s able, the queen of hearts is always your best bet.”)

In 2017, the Library of Congress selected The Eagles—Their Greatest Hits for perpetual preservation as “culturally, historically, or artistically significant.” Tell me about it. I suspect the Eagles put such relevant insights into their art because they had been where we were.

On that Friday autumn evening in 1985, Don Henley, Jack Daniels, Marc, and I played cards long into the night, not exactly listening to the lyrics, but absorbing them like osmosis. Just ahead of us—on the road of life—commitment, real jobs, financial responsibility, relationship obligations, marriage, and fatherhood waited. But wait they must on that halcyon night.

We were safe in our cocoons, soaking up the music of the caterpillars, and letting Eagles help us craft butterfly wings.

*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press in August 2021.