Keeping the Peace
and Coming to Peace
Janet Kuypers
6/29/17
The father was a stern man.
Wait, that doesn’t sound nice,
but these are the thoughts
of a little girl afraid to confront
the boisterous booming voice
behind the judgmental man.
So she would avoid him, just
in an effort to keep the peace.
And the last time she saw
her father alive, she was
still trying to keep the peace
when he yelled at both her
and medical technicians
at his doctor’s office for tests.
But even she noticed
that he then apologized
repeatedly for yelling at her.
And afterward, this lifetime
concrete construction company
owner saw a tv show
on buildings around the world
that were engineering feats.
And she sat with him,
and she recognized one hi-rise
and said, “I photographed that,”
and he seemed a bit concerned
because these were buildings
in Shanghai, China. . . so the
father kept watching, and
the daughter found an art book
she gave him of her photos.
She walked back in,
holding her book that he never opened
to the building in question
and she handed him the book
and said, “see?” before
she walked back to her chair
to watch the show of
buildings around the world. The
father flipped though the pages,
more and more slowly, looked
at images from around the world
and portraits of his daughter,
then her models, “I was just
looking to see if I recognized
anyone,” the father said
at the portraits of people
before he said to her,
“You know, you are very
good at this. You are very
creative.” And with this he
stopped speaking, and
the daughter only said,
“Thank you,” before she
took the book back
to put on his shelf;
the book she got back weeks
after he died. Looking back,
all the daughter could think
was that this might have been
the father’s only way
to come to peace with
their lifetime of subliminal
tension, that this last night
together may have been
his only chance to connect
with his youngest daughter
in his only way to come to peace.
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