About Naomi Weiss Barber

This is me a last chance story writing itself born in 1940 a war roaring incantations of Jews calculatingly being incinerated yet five overheard. There is no chronology I move through time as recollections come to me elliptical time torque time twisting time hold me in sway irreverent reckless dissonant counter voices made mute. I am here full blown stills moments in time projected on a vast wall nothing censored expurgated death scans the stills as I think back reclaiming rallying desirous of being fully visible in the moment of last breathes.

For Bach, my father, told me, we do it because of Bach, when I asked him why as we sat hands clasped listening to Bach’s B Minor Mass tears gliding our faces gentle rain. I was five, six, or seven. As often as I could HOUDINI fashion escape my captivity I dashed off to Branch Brook Park crossing a highly trafficked street running away with a deliberate wildness experiencing what would grow into defiance and solitariness. My thoughts were giants I could barely contain in my brain. My little soul ached with what it knew. Books were yet to comfort me with the knowledge that I was not alone. I was yet to read. The desire for the other was born holding information too weighty troubled waters coursing through my body looming a dark cloud warning of mounting, impending danger.

My father already worn thin in his 80’s deciding to die by refusing food except for an occasional swipe of water-dunked sponge. Visiting with him in the Catskills where he was living he said pointedly as I was about to play a CD of Bach Cantatas, No more Bach it is too beautiful. No more Bach it is too beautiful echoing a lesson in life’s meaning as he answered his then young daughter’s question why? My father knew that as we long for beauty we desire to be alive. He died six days later never hearing another note of Bach.

Sometime you miss the time. What else or who else would I could I should I have chosen to marry? The questions are futile. The past taunts oppositional sinister and mocking. I liken myself to some women I remember seeing in a Japanese movie that unquestioningly spent the entire day ascending and descending a precipitous mountain to keep buckets filled with necessary water. Somewhere in its essence the word keeping holds the secret and the promise. Dilsey endured, in concluding The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner ever informs.

Each day I kill myself and then walk away. I know I am not yet ready for the moment of final darkness to set in. Now my irrevocable indomitable and singular hope is that Luca, my found and medically challenged son, live and live and live to be a tottering and fulfilled very old man. I want to think or believe as my life comes tumbling down and flashing before me in those last unaccounted for minutes that in the end I did not miss the time.