jawn /jôn/ noun – (chiefly in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area) used to refer to a thing, place, person, or event that one need not or cannot give a specific name to. Jawn is a neutral, all-purpose noun used to reference any person, place, situation, or object. In casual conversation, it takes the place of the word ‘thing’.
“It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.”
— Anne Sexton
jawn one.
Maybe it’s because I ended up without a dad of my own that I became a keen observer of other people’s dads. It’s a thing that continues to this day. My favorite is spotting older men with their grown up sons and daughters. I sit on my car bumper at the flea market sometimes and seek them out with my eyes and my brain. Older men walking slowly/ simply/ not in a rush, alongside other adults who are distinctly younger than themselves/ that really catches my focus. I don’t know why either. I just like spotting these sorts of dads out in the day with their grown-up children. There’s something soothing about it, you know? There’s this inarguable kind of idealism that’s hard to shoot down. It’s very possible that it feels safe to me, to watch a dad beaming/ authentic/ at something his grown-up daughter just muttered to him as they both lean into locally-made ice cream. Innocently it goes, into their mouths, off a drippy plastic spoon. It fills me with longing: like that could be me someday. But devil’s advocate: I’m not so sure. I often wonder if poor dads or working class dads get to do this as much. Or if they even think of it. A lot of the dads I see strolling along with their mature sons and daughters, they appear to me to be fairly well off. And typically the kid does too. Not surprising. Knowing how to earn and having deeply held convictions about how money matters really seems to be a softly-spoken but adamantly taught thread between a lot of really good fathers and their kids. And if that’s the case, then I will probably end up eating ice cream all alone, standing at the kitchen island after Arle goes up, straight out of the cold cardboard tub. Just like I do now.
jawn two.
If there was a Dad’s Hall of Fame, who would be in it? I’ll tell you one thing, it wouldn’t be void of surprises, I know that. Here in the US of A, we each have our own ideas about what makes a dad great but a lot of that is systemic horsedump. Just admit it. Everything about dad life in this country is more or less tinged with weird marketing and bad poetry. Dad fishing. Dad standing at the grill. Dad golfing. Dad driving the whole family in a new Subaru/ mom in the side car seat/ kids in the back/ everyone laughing cuts to a drone shot of our 2026 vehicle moving on a well-maintained alpine road/ dipping down past a mountain lake with no other cars for miles (probably Canada)/ a big money song playing. (Has Magic Carpet Ride been used for this kind of thing yet?) Dad coaching a bad little league team. Dad tearing up watching his daughter get married. Dad weeping with diligent strength as he dances with his ‘little girl’ at the reception. We could go on and on, but you get what I’m saying? These boring run-of-the-mill Hall of Fame fathers are fine, but they’re also tired as hell. Screw all this sentimental crap, I say. Let us turn our attention to the new American dad, to the real man who does the job but has no goddamn idea how he manages… or even what the hell the job is to begin with. American manhood, and more specifically American fatherhood, shouldn’t always be seen as kind spirited fellows grilling hot dogs on an open fire anymore. We need to explore our other options here. Let’s shake stuff up, move the needle. How about Iron Maiden dads with pencil thin mustaches? They still exist you know. They are in trailer parks and also in big cities: so what about them? Why pretend they don’t qualify? And what about the MAGA dads?! Jesus, I mean, are we going to let politics ruin the Dad Hall of Fame too? Come on. You think there aren’t some damn fine men out there loving their kids right while also spreading Newsmax conspiracy theories all day every day at work? They’re bonkers maybe, but still. Is it fair to exclude them from the DHOF? I don’t see how we can. They need to be included. My point? You know my point, dipshit! It’s late in the day. America is fading. Freedom is waning. The good old days of bobbers going down while grandpa holds his grandson in his lap and urges him to REEL, REEL, REEL! with a big goofy grin on both of their adorable faces are still here, but they are also totally over. Here’s some food for thought. I just asked the AI/ I said hey, “Name me some dads who should go into the Dad Hall of Fame if such a thing existed.” It mentioned Mr Rogers, Barak Obama, Atticus Finch, Bob from Bob’s Burgers, Mufasa from The Lion King, Uncle Phil from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And Prince Harry. This is AI now. The smartest person who ever lived. And I don’t see you or me or your dad anywhere near this list. Which is what I’ve been trying to tell you all along. We’re seeing love wrong. Dads and everything.
jawn three.
My dad smoked Parliaments and kept a big john boat in the rafters of our garage. I remember him laughing like a hyena when he was excited or drunk. Or both. My dad played the drums when he was a young man but always acted as if he could get behind any kit any day of the week, even as a much older person, and still kick out the jams like he did when he was 23. My dad was wrong about that but it sits better with me now that that’s how things went. My dad didn’t wuss out about the drums. That’s not good dad form. Look, if you shot men dead way back during the war/ you need to keep telling yourself that you could pop them off from a half mile away right now/ even today/ if you had to. My dad didn’t ever seem romantic to me. I never saw him do anything nice for my mom. He must have at some point and I know we only lived with him until I was like 8 or 9, but that’s what I recall. I never saw him hand over flowers or anything. I did see him catch a lot of smallmouth bass from dark morning rivers though. He could fish, my dad. The man could fish. He couldn’t talk without tripping over his own tongue though because he’d been born and raised in Northern France and the French stuck to the roof of his EuroMouth like a spoon full of peanut butter snails. All of his English sounded immigranty right up until the end. It was awesome. My dad had a very funny side that he wore so well. But he also had a nasty awful side that stands out to me now. By the time I was 5 or 6 he was a compulsive alcoholic who drank in the daytime and drank in the night. My dad would pass out at the dinner table. Not just once or twice either. My dad would pass out at the dinner table, his face going down into a heap of mashed potatoes or onto some skimpy fried flounder pillow, and his head would stay there and he would snore. It was not unusual. But it did mean that three of us (my mom, my brother, and me) could probably relax. He wasn’t going to wake up until my mom had to wake him up to go up to bed. Until then, we could watch him, make sure he didn’t drown in the tartar sauce, watch his glass of burgandy ripple with the vibrations from the table from the quaking of his dish which was quivering whenever he was drawing a long snore in. My dad held a shotgun to my moms head once. She forgave him, I guess, but I never did. He had the tip of one finger missing from a saw accident once upon a time. I remember touching his gleaming silver wedding band while we sat together watching Sanford and Son. He would rock with laughter. I would touch my whole fingertip to his smooth short nub. I thought it was so cool. I though he was such a man’s man back then. Now he’s dead and I only every think about how much it hurts that he was a such colossal fucking selfish cunt.
• • •
“I’d love to know how Dad saw me when I was 6. I’d love to know a hundred things. When a parent dies, a filing cabinet full of all the fascinating stuff also ceases to exist. I never imagined how hungry I’d be one day to look inside it.”
— David Mitchell
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jawn four.
Love, in the eye of the beholder, is all there is. In the end, perception is everything. The paradigm/ varied as the summer breeze/ holds everything in place for you. For me, maybe I see it otherwise/ say, different than you/ but every night we are both staring at the same silvery moon. Only you are out there in your yard seeing it your way and I’m out back my place seeing it mine. Our hearts are attached to chains made of stars and the anchor for the weighted pull is way up in the sky. At night, I can feel the upside down resistance of mine when I move the thing around/ like a tiny bluegill tapping a fat wad of camp kid bologna. Something on high is waiting. Some scoundrel, I’m thinking, up there messing with me. Curious rascal looking at his reflection in the pond below/ trying to decide if I am real/ if I’m really there. That is love as far as I’m concerned. As a dad, I try to make sense of the insensible. By attempting to recall my own father and how he may have loved me, I take risks. But still it isn’t clear. There are compelling reasons I could lay out that indicate he did not care that much about me. But my saving grace, I think, might be that I’m a dad myself. As such, I understand that once upon a time, when I was born again in this world as a man with his own child, I could not escape love nor run from it successfully any longer, even if I tried like hell. Not that I ever wanted to. But some do. And some did. Like my dad. I think I tell myself that he had to have been the same as me somehow. Despite the addiction and the depression and the unusual madness that seemed to plague my father, I tell myself that somehow/ somewhere/ he must have had true love for his sons. The alternative is impossible to fathom. To have been truly unloved by him is just too much to try and wrap my head around. So I don’t even try.
“I told them I failed my draft physical. My dad, who often dismissively uttered the words ‘I can’t wait ’til the army gets ahold of you,’ sat at the kitchen table, flicked the ash off of his cigarette, took a puff, slowly let the smoke escape from his lips and mumbled, ‘That’s good.’”
— Bruce Springsteen
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jawn five.
My stepdad is a good man and I love him and miss him more than I miss some of the others. We met when I was 16 and he was in his 40’s. He also had his own sons then. Things often become hard to connect with the connections we intend to plug them into. Or simply the ones we only imagine. But I was so grown by the time I met him and that could have been the end of our world together right there. A teenage boy might shut down a stepdad coming into his world and no one would ever not understand. It doesn’t make it pretty but it sure doesn’t make it wrong either. But me, I was also needing things. I was in need of son-type things you can only get from a dad. And he brought them to me. He did. He never asked for much in return either. He wanted me to respect my mom and not to mouth off to her and that was good for me to hear and to understand. He also wanted me to not be a lazy little baby bitch and that helped me tremendously. All my life since I was a teenager I have always worked… and secretly between me and you, I always felt really good inside when he would answer the phone or corner me at the 4th of July and tell me he was proud of me. He took me hunting and although I could always sense that there was blood spark missing somehow, I also came to understand that it wasn’t his fault or mine. Being alive is hard. Being a parent or a parent’s child is hard. Step stuff is awfully difficult to navigate. That’s why there’s so much mileage in the Disney mean stepmother character. Literature and cinema is brimming with stepparents who rule with an iron fist and love their own blood children but despise their step-kids. It wasn’t some narrative fad either. It’s all there in the script because it has been there in the lives of the people who wrote the scripts. Art has taken the evil step parent (usually the step-mom, I have no clue why) and lifted them into this rarified light. Ironically, whenever someone has a loving, decent stepparent the people who have never had a stepparent seem to have a hard time processing that. Why? Because the image of the nasty fictional stepparent is burnt into our minds. And aside from that, in reality it is nearly impossible for anyone who has never been in a blended family to imagine what that is like. Or what it could be like even. With me and my stepdad, there were a lot of holes, a lot of things we missed out on because of timing or because of who we both are: caring men who have no idea how to say what we would love to say. Doesn’t matter though. He is a better man than my own dad was by galaxies. That much I know. We don’t speak now because of things we can’t even explain. It is what it is. But if there was ever a reason in my world for stupid ass Father’s day to exist, I guess it was him. From where I stand now, I’m sure I was lucky. And who knows/ maybe he was too.
jawn six.
After my dad died, he got the cremation. My family, who I am not on great terms with, they barely responded to my questions about how he died or whatever. It was typical of them. But surprise, surprise: they did let me know when they had his ashes. I think they made sure they told me they had him and where he was so it seemed like he was their’s to take care of now. Not mine. Like he chose them to guard his stupid ashes. Whatever. They told me I could have some of his ashes if I wanted them, like he was a gift for me that they would share if I came to them to receive their kindness. It irked the fuck out of me. It felt possessive and wrongheaded and lame. It felt like when someone down the road has way too many zucchini so they just put them on your porch without asking. You won’t question their motives. They know that. You will have to say thanks and even if you don’t say it, you won’t say anything else. You’ll just deal with it. You will eat their excess zucchini or you will let it rot on your kitchen counter or you will throw it in someone else’s field, no one cares. They just know you won’t do shit or say shit and they are dealing with less zucchini and why do they even still plant that son-of-a-bitch anymore? Except this was my dad. Our dad. Or her ex husband. Or his wife’s ex. Or her ex-husband’s dad. Whatever. Fuck off. Death is a shitshow for the living. Everyone involved in my dad’s dying was packed into a clown car of narcissistic death money. Dumb. Dumb. Dumb. So I waited until certain people went to the beach and then I drove over there and the key was still right where it always was. The dog was at the kennel. It was early on a weekday in the middle of a slow old week. I looked around and it wasn’t that hard to find him. I think a certain someone was oddly tickled having him there. I suspect she got off on forgiving him and cherishing him even though he had been a colossal monster to her back when things actually counted for something. But after you die all that counts is what the living say counts. It’s fucked up, but try and remember that. Anyway, I surveyed the scene/ found what I was after/ processed how the ashes were contained/ made some notes to myself. I took a few pictures with my phone so I could replicate and recreate. Then I drove to Lowes, listening to jazz, and got what I needed. I went back. It was still before lunch. I talked to my dad a little as I rescued him, as I replaced him with substitute ashes. I had big soft scoops leftover from doing up dozens of Amish-style chicken thighs on my charcoal grill all summer long. The day before I’d slapped the chicken ashes around in a thick paper bag so they broke down nice. Then I pounded all that into what you would expect to have. Ridiculously expensive funeral home powder. It was so weird. But it was also ridiculously easy. I soft hammered it all with a small rubber mallet on a marble pizza stone. Straight up, you can find out how to do anything on the internet anymore. You don’t even need to go on the “dark web” or whatever. I don’t even know how to access the dark web. I just went on Reddit and searched how to replace a dead person’s ashes. There were way more threads and comments about the subject than you would think, too. It was validating, if I’m being honest. When I was done, I’d replaced my dad with the Walmart chicken ashes and everything looked good. The seal was authentic. No one would know because they didn’t want to know. When it comes to dead men and their money, people lose their goddamn minds. They only see what they need to see, trust me. I didn’t make a big deal out of me and my dad reuniting like that. It seemed overzealous. I knew I could write a whole memoir with this as the centerpiece if I wanted to, but I don’t have it in me. I drove home with my old man riding shotgun. I had him in his sack in a big silver coffee can. I don’t remember what I said on the ride over the mountain. Nothing prolific, I guess. I do remember that I purposefully played Karma Chameleon because I’m sure he would have hated that song and that was kind of my vibe here. There was love involved, I guess, but you know how it is. Complications and all. It felt powerful to jack that song up as loud as my bluetooth speaker would go. Fucking Boy George. So perfect. I never told anyone/ not Arle or the kids. This was my thing. My dad. I know he would have liked this, actually. I took his entire being to the lake over in Poe Valley and I walked out on the dam and I shook his ass out on a bright blue October morning. He always said he wanted to live on a lake. Fucking idiot.
jawn seven.
Charlie is 11 now, and me and Arle moved in together on August 1, 2018 so that’s how I know how many years I was a single dad. I go by Charlie’s age. He was born on March 2, 2014. His mom and I had split up not long before that. A few months, I guess. And just prior to his arrival, in January, my ex stayed in the big farmhouse we had been living in while I shuffled over to my mom and stepdad’s tiny place. The world seems so different to me now than back then. Even though it wasn’t all that long ago, it seems an endless eternity now. Therapists and specialists have spoken to me at length and in depth of the trauma I likely endured during that time period. And listen, cringe all you want. I get it. I cringe at it too. Hell, I have had to punch myself in the face many times just to stumble past the stubborn parts of me which snarl at the notion of being included in the modern trauma parade. Yet I flirted ultra closely with Tragic End quite a few times since that Day 1 of my immersion into single parenthood. And I have found that I am impacted forever by people and events that took place during the years I was trying to create a new life. Because of that, I ultimately had to choose: either I finally set foot down in the dark woods of my realistic past and recognize it/ or I had to bite my lip and just get on with things, whatever that meant. In the end, I sought help. A lot of it. And give me more if you got it, man. That said, I’m really happy that I’m still here, still trying. These days, as Charlie flops through the kitchen/ moving like a 5th grade Bill Murray with his shaggy head of hair and his Hawaiian shirts/ I see him slump-stepping to the fridge for cold fried chicken from the Mennonite supermarket, and I watch him out of the corner of my eye and here’s the thing. Sometimes I feel like I did pretty damn good, all things considered. I almost never pat myself on the back. I hardly ever give myself any credit for having stood up in the face of so much madness and so much pain and fear. But you want to know something? I did that. Me. Serge. Dad. I did that. I survived it all. And I did it time and time and time again for the right reason, because I wanted the kids to be okay. To live and survive and have me in their world no matter how very destructible I had found out I was. No matter how blue or broken or silly or lonesome or fucked up or unhinged or sad or goddamn incredible I was on any given day, I persevered. I did what I could. And I found a way to stick around.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin.
