advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Boy Who Finished His Sums Standing Up. AI-Generated.
The first afternoon There was a boy called Sipho who would not sit down on the first day. He stood at the end of the long trestle table with his exercise book open, bent over it, writing his sums standing up like a clerk at a counter. I asked him why he would not take a chair and he said his legs were tired from walking but his hand still worked, so he may as well keep his hand busy while his legs had a rest from being sat on all day. I did not fully follow the logic, but I was sixty-one years old and newly retired, and I had spent thirty-four years in classrooms, so I knew better than to argue with a child who had found his own system. I let him stand. He finished every sum correctly. Then he asked me, very politely, whether there was anything to drink.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Allergy Card I Could Not Find While a Four-Year-Old Turned Pink. AI-Generated.
The morning the cupboard beat me His name is Sma, he is four, and he loves the orange plastic spade more than any child I have ever taught. On a Tuesday in February, hot the way only Durban is hot, he bit into half a muffin a well-meaning parent had brought for a birthday, and within a minute his lips went fat and strange and he started pulling at his own collar. One of my teachers, Nompumelelo, had him on her hip before I had even stood up. And I ran, in my sensible shoes, down the short passage to the office, to the grey steel cupboard where I keep the allergy lists, because I needed to know, right then, in that second, whether this was nuts or egg or dairy or nothing at all, and whether his mother had written down that he carries an adrenaline pen in his bag.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Morning My Mother Folded My Whole Life Into One Suitcase. AI-Generated.
The suitcase on the bed My mother started packing three days before I was due to leave, and she packed slowly, the way she does everything that matters to her. The suitcase was the hard blue one my uncle had brought back from Gauteng years ago, and it had sat on top of the wardrobe gathering dust for so long that it smelled of the wardrobe itself when she brought it down. She laid it open on my bed and stood looking at it for a while, and I understood then that she was not really looking at a suitcase. She was looking at the fact that I was going.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Cellar Under the House Learned to Hold Me Up. AI-Generated.
The crash I did not see coming The cellar came into my life because my shoulder went out of it. I want to be honest about the order of things, because for a while I got it backwards and told people the room came first, as though I had planned any of this.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
His Motorcycle Was Half-Built When He Died, and I Decided to Finish It. AI-Generated.
The bike he never got to ride Derek bought the motorcycle the winter before he died. It was a 1979 Honda, the colour of old mustard under all the dust, and he brought it home on a trailer with the kind of smile a grown man is not supposed to have about a machine that did not run. He parked it in the middle of the garage, put his hands on his hips, and said he would have it going by summer. He had the tank off and the carburettors soaking in a jam jar of petrol when his heart stopped on an ordinary Tuesday in May. He was fifty-four. I was fifty-one, and I did not know a torque wrench from a tyre lever.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Afternoon a Camera Went Off Inside My Own Eye. AI-Generated.
The bench by the window My workshop is barely wider than a corridor. It sits off a side street in Johannesburg, tucked between a tailor and a shop that cuts keys, and on a good day the light comes in low and golden across my bench at about four in the afternoon. I have worked at that bench for close to thirty years. There is a leather pad worn to the shape of my forearms, a row of screwdrivers so fine they look like they belong to a surgeon, and a loupe that has pressed a faint ring around my right eye socket for so long that my wife says it is part of my face now.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
Twelve Small Chairs and the Graduation I Did Not Think We Would Reach. AI-Generated.
When my mother died she left me her house in Germiston, a face-brick place with a big yard and a lemon tree that drops more than anyone could ever use. My brother wanted to sell it and split the money. I understood him, he has his own family and his own needs, but I could not do it. I had spent my childhood in that yard. So I bought out his share with money I did not really have, and then I sat in the empty house wondering what on earth I was going to do with a four bedroom home and a mortgage I had taken on out of sentiment.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Deli Owner Who Asked Me One Question I Could Not Answer. AI-Generated.
I make fermented drinks. Kombucha, water kefir, a ginger thing my grandmother used to brew that I have never found a proper name for. It started, as these things do, as a hobby that got out of hand. I was working in an office I disliked, brewing jars of it on my kitchen counter, giving bottles away to friends who were too polite to refuse. One of them, less polite than the rest, told me it was good enough to sell. That sentence cost me my office job and the better part of my sanity, and I have never been happier.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Lawn That Finally Won, and the Flat That Gave Us Back Our Weekends. AI-Generated.
The argument that started all of this was about a lawnmower, which is a ridiculous thing for a marriage of thirty-four years to nearly come apart over, and yet there we were, my wife Sandra and I, standing on the back lawn on a Saturday morning in Centurion, not speaking, while the mower sat between us refusing to start for the third week running.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Caravan We Bought at Sixty-Six and the Dashboard That Finally Made Sense. AI-Generated.
We bought the caravan the year I retired, which everyone warned us was a cliche, and we did it anyway because the alternative was sitting in a quiet house in Kempton Park waiting for the grandchildren to visit. My wife, Elize, had wanted one for thirty years. I had always found a reason not to. When the reasons ran out, which is what retirement really is, we drove to a dealership outside Pretoria and bought a second-hand caravan that smelled faintly of someone else's holidays, and we named her nothing because Elize said naming a caravan is bad luck, she had read it somewhere.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Ice Cream Tub That Collected a Congregation's Broken Gold. AI-Generated.
Our church hall in Benoni has a flat roof, which is the original sin of South African buildings, and after eleven years of being patched it finally gave up during a highveld storm in November. The water came through the ceiling boards over the kitchen, over the little stage where the children do their nativity, and into the cupboard where we keep the urn and the good cups. By morning the hall smelled of wet plaster and the quote from the roofing man was more money than our small congregation sees in a year.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
The Alto Who Stopped Singing in the Middle of Kyrie. AI-Generated.
I sing second alto in a community choir in Pretoria, which is a grand way of saying I stand in the back row on a Thursday evening and try not to drag the sopranos flat. We are not a famous choir. We are mostly women between fifty and seventy, a few patient husbands, and a conductor named Rina who waves her arms as if she is trying to land an aircraft. We rehearse in a church hall that smells of floor polish and instant coffee, and we have done so for eleven years.
By Josh Maraneyabout a month ago in Journal
