advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Metronome Kept Time When I Could Not. AI-Generated.
The morning everything went soft at the edges My husband Daniel died on a Tuesday in February, and for a long time afterwards I could not tell you what day of the week it was at all. I am fifty-four. I teach piano, mostly children, a few grown adults who come in the evenings smelling of coffee and apology for not practising. We had been married twenty-nine years. He used to sit in the kitchen while I gave lessons and pretend he was not listening, and when a child finally got a passage right he would knock twice on the wall, softly, so only I would hear it.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Afternoon I Read the Same Paragraph Four Times. AI-Generated.
The three feet that changed my autumn I have added up other people's money for twenty-two years. I am the guy who catches the transposed digit, the one who notices when a column feels wrong before I even total it. So when I tell you that last October I read a single paragraph of a lease agreement four times and still could not tell you what it said, understand that this was not a small thing to me. It was like a carpenter picking up a hammer and forgetting which end to hold.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Man Who Sets Up the Chairs. AI-Generated.
How it started with a borrowed gazebo I never planned to be the chair man. In our part of the North West, near Rustenburg, you become the thing the town needs before you ever decide to be it. It began the Saturday my cousin got married and the company he booked simply did not arrive. No tent, no tables, nothing. Just a groom in a shiny grey suit standing in a dusty yard, sweating through the jacket, and forty aunties looking at him like it was his fault the sky was open.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Winter I Sewed Two Thousand Blazers in Mthatha. AI-Generated.
The smell I go to sleep with People always ask me what my workshop smells like, and I never know how to answer without sounding strange. It smells of raw cotton drill, the kind that comes off the bolt still stiff and a little dusty, and under that there is machine oil, warm and faintly sweet, the smell of the Juki heads when they have been running since seven in the morning. There is a third smell too, scorched steam from the industrial iron when Nomvula presses seams flat, and if you have ever stood in a small room in Mthatha with three overlockers going at once, you know that smell gets into your jersey and stays there for days. My husband used to tease me that he could tell which room of the house I had walked into last because the couch would smell of thread.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Man Who Remembered the Water Better Than My Name. AI-Generated.
The morning he said yes My father is eighty-one and he forgets what he ate for breakfast, but he can still tell you the exact colour the sea turned in Mozambique the summer before he left. Not blue, he says, and never grey. Something between green and pewter, with a skin of gold on top when the sun came down. I had heard about that water my whole life. It lived in the house like a fourth family member, mentioned at dinner, mentioned when the rain came, mentioned when a certain song played on the radio and his eyes went soft and far away.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
I Was Born in Soweto and Never Once Toured It Until My Niece Flew In From London. AI-Generated.
The phone call that started it My niece Naledi phoned me on a Tuesday night, the kind of Highveld evening where the sky goes bruised purple before the rain and everybody on our street starts pulling washing off the lines in a hurry. She was calling from London, where she has lived since she was nine, and her voice had that flattened vowel now, the accent of a girl who has spent more of her life beside the Thames than beside the Klip River. She said she was coming to South Africa for three weeks, and she wanted one thing from me. She wanted to see the real Soweto.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Counter Knows Me Better Than My Own Kitchen. AI-Generated.
Before the sun, before the bread My name is Thandeka, and for nineteen years I have opened the same door onto the same street in KwaMashu. I do it in the dark, most mornings, because the taxis start their coughing early and the men who work at the plant want their loose cigarettes and their fat cakes before the first rank fills up. The padlock is cold in my hand at that hour. I have felt that same cold so many times that my fingers know the shape of it without looking, the little catch on the second turn, the way it swings up before it clicks free.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Weight of a Wristwatch My Brother Never Took Off. AI-Generated.
The second drawer down My brother Sipho wore that watch to church, to funerals, and to the beach at Amanzimtoti where he swore the salt air did it no harm. When he died, it came to me in a small brown envelope with my name written on the front in his slanted, hurried hand, the same hand that had marked exam papers for thirty years before he retired. I put the envelope in the second drawer down in my bedroom, under a folded pillowcase I never used, and for the better part of six years I let it stay there.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
I Had Ninety Metres To Walk And A Year To Learn How. AI-Generated.
The sentence that started it all My daughter got engaged on a cold Sunday in November, and the first thing she said to me, before she had even told her brothers, was, Mom, you are walking me down the aisle. Not her father, who left when she was small and has never been much of a presence. Me. She wanted me. And I said yes, of course, darling, absolutely, while a small cold voice at the back of my head said, you cannot walk properly and you both know it.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Drawer Of Broken Chains I Turned Into A Cross-Country Drive. AI-Generated.
Thirty-one years of other people's history I taught high school history for thirty-one years in a small town in the American Midwest, and I retired last spring to a quiet house, a decent pension, and the slow, disorienting realization that I had spent three decades telling teenagers to go see the world while never really seeing much of it myself. Summers were for summer jobs. Money was always tight in the way it is tight for teachers, never a catastrophe, just a permanent low hum of caution that meant the big trip was always next year, and then next year again.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Door That Trapped Twelve Bicycles And My Whole Weekend. AI-Generated.
The garage that stopped being a garage Somewhere around the time I turned forty-six, my garage quietly stopped holding a car and started holding bicycles. It happened the way these things happen, one at a time. I fixed up an old steel-framed bike I found at a church sale, mostly to have something to do with my hands after my divorce, and a neighbour saw it and asked if I could do the same to her son's. Then her friend asked. Then a stranger, referred by the friend, arrived with a rusted heap that had been her late father's and asked, a little tearfully, whether it could be saved.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Sister Who Asked Me To Drive, And Not To Talk. AI-Generated.
The phone call I did not expect My younger sister and I are close now, but we were not always. There is a five-year gap between us, which is nothing when you are adults and everything when you are children, and for a long time I was more like a bossy aunt to her than a sister. I gave advice she did not ask for. I had opinions about her choices. I thought, in the arrogant way of older siblings, that I knew what her life should look like better than she did.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
