advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Morning My Knees Voted Against Me. AI-Generated.
The dawn I nearly quit There is a particular sound a man in his early sixties makes when he tries to get up off a ground mattress at half past four in the morning. It is not a word. It is more of a low, negotiating groan, the sort of noise you might hear from a diesel bakkie that has been left out in the cold and would rather not start today. I made that sound in the Kruger, at Satara, on a July morning so crisp that the inside of the tent flap had gone stiff, and my wife Marina, who was already up and had the kettle whispering on the gas, did not even turn around. She just said, without any particular sympathy, "Take your time, Bruce."
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Bride's Hem I Could Not See. AI-Generated.
There is a particular silence that falls over a room when you have made a mistake with your hands. Not a loud silence. A small one. The kind that lives in the space between your own breathing and the thing you have just done wrong. I know that silence very well now. I met it properly for the first time on a Thursday afternoon in Bez Valley, with a wedding dress across my lap and a bride due in ninety minutes.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Corner Shop My Aunt Left Me. AI-Generated.
The Cracked Lintel And The Pigeons The first time I went back after the letter from the lawyer, I stood in the ruined back room and did not move for a long time. There was a lintel above the old storeroom door, a heavy grey beam that had held up that part of the wall since before I was born, and it had split down the middle. The crack ran across it like a mouth that had opened and stayed open. Above it the ceiling had sagged and let in a wedge of sky. Pigeons had moved in through the gap. They shifted and muttered on the broken rafters, and when I stepped on a loose board two of them clattered out into the light, and I felt my heart go with them.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Cruiser, the Concrete, and My Granddaughter's First Big Mess. AI-Generated.
The afternoon it all went sideways It was a Thursday in late autumn, and the light in Bloemfontein was doing that low golden thing it does before winter properly bites. Lerato was under the old Land Cruiser with a drain pan, or rather she thought she had the drain pan lined up, and I was on the far side wiping my hands and telling her to take her time. She is fifteen. She has more nerve than most of the apprentices I worked with over forty years, but nerve without aim is how you end up wearing a sump full of old engine oil.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Sunday It Was My Turn. AI-Generated.
The phone call I did not want It was a Tuesday when Lindiwe phoned, and I knew before she spoke that something was different, because Lindiwe never phones on a Tuesday. She is my sister-in-law, my late brother's wife, and for eleven years she has hosted the family Sunday lunch at her house in Kempton Park without ever once making it look like effort. Her voice was thin down the line. The operation had been moved forward. The doctor wanted her flat on her back for at least three weeks, no lifting, no standing over a stove, none of the things she does so naturally that the rest of us have never had to think about them.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
Two in the Morning in a Suburb I Could Not Name. AI-Generated.
The heat came off her like a stove At two in the morning I had my hand on my daughter's back and I could feel the fever through her pyjamas. Not warm. Hot. The kind of hot that made me pull my hand away for a second before I made myself put it back. She was fifteen months old and she was making a sound I had never heard from her before, a thin whimper that trailed off into nothing and then started again. Her cheeks were red. Her hair was stuck to her forehead in wet little curls. When I lifted her up she did not grab at me the way she always did. She just went heavy in my arms, like a sack of mielie meal, and that frightened me more than the crying.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Corner of Lawn That Refused to Die. AI-Generated.
The green that made no sense There is a rectangle of grass near my back fence, roughly the size of a single bed, that stayed a deep bottle green all through this Pretoria winter while everything around it went the colour of weak tea. I am sixty seven, retired from teaching high school Physical Sciences for the better part of four decades, and I have spent enough of my life explaining why things happen to feel personally insulted when something happens for no reason I can see.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
The Night the Rain Came Through the Roof and the Old Tower Gave Up. AI-Generated.
The storm that broke everything came in on a Tuesday in March, the kind of Durban rain that does not fall so much as land. I remember standing at the window of our little studio in Glenwood, watching the gutters give up one by one, water sheeting off the neighbour's carport in a solid grey wall. The air had that heavy, green smell it gets here before a big one, jasmine and hot tar and something electric underneath. I had a set of drawings due to a client in Umhlanga on the Friday, a double-storey renovation we had been fiddling with for months, and I was thinking about nothing more urgent than whether the taxi rank down the road would flood again.
By Josh Maraney2 months ago in Journal
