advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
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 Maraney3 days 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 Maraney3 days 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 Maraney3 days 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 Maraney3 days 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 Maraney3 days 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 Maraney3 days 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 Maraney3 days ago in Journal
My Son's Skin Taught Me To Read The Weather Like A Sailor. AI-Generated.
The boy who could not sit in the sun My son Finn arrived pale as milk and stayed that way. His older sister tans like her mother, an easy golden brown by December, but Finn inherited some quiet ancestral genetics from my side, the side that came from grey northern places, and the Australian sun treated his skin like an insult it wanted to answer immediately.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
I Went For The Dark Sky And The Elephants Ambushed Me. AI-Generated.
A man who looks up I have been an amateur astronomer for most of my adult life, which is a polite way of saying I have spent thirty years driving away from cities in the middle of the night to look at things that were already there. I am not a scientist. I am an accountant, actually, with a small refractor telescope and a folding chair and a thermos, and a deep, slightly obsessive love of a truly dark sky.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
The Chipped Tooth That Nearly Ended My Playing. AI-Generated.
A embouchure is a fragile thing Most people think a brass player plays with their lungs. We do not, not really. We play with a tiny, ridiculous, deeply personal arrangement of lips, teeth and muscle called the embouchure, and it takes years to build and about a second to ruin. I have played the trumpet since I was eleven. I am fifty-two now. For most of those years I have earned my living teaching it, in a rented studio in Sandton with terrible parking and a piano that is always slightly flat, and I have never once taken my front teeth for granted, because my front teeth are where the sound begins.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
My Grandfather's Bakkie Sat Under A Lemon Tree For Six Years. AI-Generated.
The bakkie and the man My grandfather drove the same white bakkie for as long as I was alive. It was a battered old thing, older than me, and it smelled of pipe tobacco and Sunlight soap and the particular dust of the small Free State town where he farmed a few hectares of not very much. He was not a wealthy man. He was a careful one. The bakkie was how he fetched feed, took vegetables to the co-op, ferried me to school when my mother could not, and drove himself, slowly and with great dignity, to church every Sunday in a jacket that no longer quite fit.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
The Sea Told Me Where To Live Before The Estate Agent Did. AI-Generated.
A swimmer who forgot how to float I swam competitively from the age of nine, and then I coached swimming, and then I ran a small learn-to-swim school in a suburb of Johannesburg for twenty-six years. Water was my whole working life, which is a strange thing to say about a city that sits on a high, dry plateau a thousand kilometres from the nearest coast. I taught toddlers to blow bubbles and I taught nervous grandmothers to put their faces in, and every night I dreamed, genuinely dreamed, of the sea.
By Josh Maraney3 days ago in Journal
