Walks on the Margins by Kathy Brandt

Author:Kathy Brandt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: depression, mental illness, memoir, recovery, manic depression, bipolar disorder, memoir family, nami, speaking out
Publisher: Kathy Brandt

Chapter 13

Candy Junkie

Max

I pulled my camera strap over my neck and put my right foot out into the untouched crystal bed. Letting my weight down I was suddenly waist deep in a snowdrift. My light meter was shot, but I let out a solitary laugh through the valley below my parent’s new mountain home. It was all too perfect, the sky, a rich warm blue above.

I had a typically restless night. Twice a week I worked the graveyard shift at the Ute Pass Senior Residence, where I got an occasional wink on the couch while the eight elderly people in my care slept away eleven hours of a winter night. I watched Perry Mason or the documentary on the Musée d’Orsay through the long hours, occasionally swallowing a Percocet loose in the bottom of the medicine cabinet. Around 6:15 in the morning, I prepared a breakfast of oatmeal, toast, and scrambled eggs, or whatever was on the schedule for Wednesday.

I changed George’s dirty diaper and tried to encourage him that it would be a great day today. I hefted up all 175 pounds of the 99 year-old Marion, who had probably been sitting in a pool of urine for twenty minutes while I pulled George’s flannel shirt over his head and combed his hair to the side, his eyes always focused on the same spot on my upper left arm. When I yanked her pants off, Marion sometimes surprised me with a slap to the face, screaming bloody murder as if it were date rape at senior prom.

The rest of them could get up by themselves. Breakfast always came five minutes late on my shift, something noticed by all and inevitably commented on by Hampton and Ernie, who had been awake since five a.m. in their separate rooms, watching the sun creep into the woods and light up the red rocks. No doubt these early-risers were perfecting their complaints, which I could only overcome with the charm for which I was hired (I had, after all, no related experience whatsoever).

I reminded most of them of their grandson, if I weren’t in fact mistaken for him. But what can I say? I liked old people and these folks were my friends. A plate of food in front of each of them, with all special modifications made, I poured the orange juice and gathered the little foggy-plastic cups of capsules, tablets, and liquids. Pinching them off an old cafeteria tray covered in a fresh piece of white paper, I set the respective medicines out in front of each of them.

I would walk home after my shift, stepping through holes in barbed wire fences, running from the local dogs as I made fresh tracks westerly. I’d say good morning to Mom while coffee brewed, anticipating the peace of taking photos on a winter Wednesday like a true aristocrat.

But it seemed my hobby had been perhaps forever hindered. I climbed the hill, stuck the broken camera in the closet, and examined the morphine pouch I swiped from the medicine cabinet at work.

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