The First Words My Godfather Shared on God Were His Last

A hidden language of his own: seeing things others couldn’t

Eldest children build family traditions. Youngest kids innovate. My Uncle David, the youngest of his generation, was always pushing against walls.

Or tearing walls down, getting around the barriers, or building new ways.

He was 16 when I was born. We seldom talked about faith or culture: You simply learned it by following and imitating elders, friends, and peers. Two photos on my Grandma’s wall forever shaped the way I knew him:

• Rebel Dave, sitting on a souped-up motorcycle with long jet black hair, a T-shirt, jeans, a pack of smokes up his sleeve, and a steel-eyed stare. He was the little boy who took his father’s white ’59 Cadillac for a joy ride through the city streets. Grandpa chased him. Rebel Dave raced till caught.
• Angelic David, the sweet soldier sporting a military school uniform and crew cut, going on to be a Detroit cop. He was the same innovative boy who figured out how to bravely endure the hardest of beatings (slipping a magazine in his pants to ease the sting of spankings).

He battled all sorts of adversaries and ailments (we thought he might have had a heart issue as early as age 38). He died June 18 at 72 — in the garden.

Finding hope in the turmoil

Do you think crime and the world are intense today? Imagine Detroit in the 1970s, ’80s, and early ’90s. Detroit was on the cutting edge of crime: A Detroit News reporter pal invented the term “car-jacking” before it went national.

Uncle David had as many as 100 homes in Detroit’s toughest neighborhoods when the crime rate was at its all-time peak. The Detroit Free Press Sunday Magazine did a 1992 cover story on Uncle David’s bravery and blunt open honesty in that era. Do you want the unvarnished truth? Here’s a sample:

“David Siwak has been a Detroit cop for 22 years. ‘You smell like a pig,’ a man once told him while he had a 12-gauge shotgun pointed at Siwak’s ear. And at a fancy Grosse Pointe party, a lady said, ‘A city cop? Oooooh. How tacky.’’’

Like his Grandfather Antoni Polec, my uncle could “take a car apart and put it back together again.” He looked at it and always figured it out. Both David and Antoni pioneered “flipping” everything from cars to real estate.

Grandpa Antoni flipped investments internationally, including a hotel, moving back and forth between Poland and America when he wasn’t using his master craftsmen skills building up a new auto company called Ford.

Like his father, Whispering Joe Siwak, Uncle David fluently spoke the language of anything people could assemble from carpentry to a pinball machine.

The challenge: he spoke languages indecipherable to the rest of us

I vividly remember Christmas 1989 when he lovingly bought his parents (then in their 60s) a new Motorola “bag cell phone,” one of the first on the market. About a thousand dollars. I was shocked he spent that kind of money on a gift.

Grandma Helen, with the softness of a bowling ball, wasn’t easy on anyone: She was mad he spent that kind of money on something she would never figure out. She preferred matching Ma and Pa sweaters.

Thirty-one years later, Uncle David private messaged me on Facebook lamenting that he’d given my dad (his now 77-year-old big brother) his first iPhone, and he still hadn’t activated it six months later. Dad is happier with his flip phone, just as Grandma liked the switchboard she operated in the 1940s. But Uncle David always tried to help move them to something new.

His father, my Grandpa Joe, had the third-largest coin machine route in Michigan, mastering everything from jukeboxes to pool tables to pinball machines. When we needed to get a massive 1967 era Ski Ball machine out of my childhood basement and into my adult home a decade ago, Dad knew:

“We need David for this one.”

Who else could fathom a way to get a massive, heavy, and long mechanical device out of one little basement, up the stairs, into a pickup and get it 50 miles away without busting any of the intricate tubes, shoots, or glass pieces?

I remember trailing the pickup along Interstate-696, the busiest road in Michigan. Cars shot past blaring their horns, and Dad shouted back:

“Can’t you see we’ve got a Ski Ball machine?”

We needed to unload it and try to turn it on after years of abandonment. It was a giant metaphor for all the big messed up things most fail to notice: most see old junk. Uncle David saw the opportunity to turn trash into treasure.

Of course, there’s a cost for such unrepeatable services no one else on earth could perform: lunch at Zingerman’s Deli, one of the greatest sandwich makers in America.

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. It is not important that he should mature as soon as an apple-tree or an oak. Shall he turn his spring into summer?” — Henry David Thoreau.

I remember, like yesterday being about 4 or 5 when my dad drove us to Grandma’s house, and Uncle David came to the car and said, “Hey man, guess what? I got married.” I remember thinking that was unusual (eloping? No big family wedding?).

He eloped, and his parents went along, which also seemed unusual. It was the first of many firsts and new ways.

Like many families, we saw a lot of him during certain years and little other times. But in the last year of his life, while our dad can’t master anything newer than a Fax machine, Uncle David reconnected with family via that new thing called Facebook.

In the final year of his life, he started private messaging, mostly political or conspiracy videos, that sort of thing. But the very last final message was about God, a meme saying:

“With what is going on in the world these days, Heaven could end up a ghost town. My name is God. You hardly have time for Me. I love you and will always bless you. I am with you. I need you to spend 60 seconds of your time with Me today.

“Don’t pray. Just praise. Today I want this message to go across the world… Why are prayers getting smaller, but bars and clubs are expanding? Why is it so easy to worship a celebrity, but very difficult to engage with God?

“God said if you deny me in front of your friends, I will deny you on the Day of Judgement. When one door closes, God opens two. If God has opened doors for you, send this message to everyone. Forward if God’s been good to you.’’

John 1:39? The day before he died

It was one of those internet memes you quickly scan and forget. But you couldn’t ignore this note because he never sent anything religious.

And he happened to send that one at 1:39 p.m. on June 17, and he died the very next day, the evening of June 18. Did he sense something? Was he channeling a bigger message from a higher power? Out of curiosity, I Googled “Bible 1:39,” and up came this:

“He said to them, ‘Come, and you will see.’ So they went and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him that day. It was about four in the afternoon.’’ (John 1:39, NABRE).

He died the next day while working in his garden. His heart, they suspected. His children carry on, each inheriting different gifts from their father:

• His son, a journeyman in multiple trades with his own big beautiful family, looks a lot like him, inheriting his “craftsman” genes. His son is named Joe (just like me. We are both named after our legendary Grandpa Joe).
• His daughters. Uncle David also had many daughters, a diverse group with their own cultures, talents, and gifts now spread across the country from San Francisco to South Carolina, all very different yet each representing a piece of a complicated yet adventurous life.

Sons remind fathers of themselves. Like father, like son. Daughters remind dads of life’s limitless future of possibilities beyond ourselves.