advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Weight Of A Good Handle. AI-Generated.
My father cut keys for half of Benoni. Not officially, not with a shop front and a sign, just a workbench in the garage with a machine bolted to it that hummed like an unhappy bee, and a drawer of blanks sorted by shape that only he understood. People would knock on our gate on a Saturday morning holding a single key wrapped in a bit of newspaper, and he would look at it the way other men look at a form of respect, turning it over, running his thumb along the teeth before he even switched the machine on. He died in April, quietly, in his sleep, which everyone kept telling me was a mercy, and maybe it was, but it left me standing in his house in Kempton Park with a bunch of his own keys in my hand and no idea which door any of them opened anymore.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
Two Sisters, One Fire, No Arguing About Dinner. AI-Generated.
The Distance We Never Named My sister Naomi and I grew up sharing a bedroom in Johannesburg with two single beds pushed so close together we could reach across the gap and hold hands if one of us had a nightmare. She left for London when she was twenty six, for a boy who didn't work out and a career that did, and somewhere in the thirty years since, the space between our beds turned into an ocean neither of us knew how to swim back across. I stayed. I married a man from our shul, kept a kosher kitchen with two sets of dishes and a separate sink drainer that my children still tease me about, and raised my family inside the same rhythms our mother raised us in. Naomi didn't reject any of it exactly. She just stopped. First it was the odd Friday night dinner skipped because of work, then it was a whole decade where she told me on the phone she still felt Jewish in her heart, which is a sentence I came to dread because I never knew what to say back to it that didn't sound like an accusation.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Curtain at Rietvlei. AI-Generated.
The morning the weavers were building I have been chasing birds with a camera for the better part of twenty years, and if you asked me what I loved most about it, I would not talk about the rare sightings or the long lens I saved two years to buy. I would tell you about ordinary mornings like the one at Rietvlei, when the light comes up soft over the Highveld and the reeds are still cold and the whole dam seems to be holding its breath before the day starts properly.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Little Blue Polo I Named Nandi, and the Bay She Sat In Too Long. AI-Generated.
The car I bought before I trusted myself to I named her Nandi. I know that sounds ridiculous, naming a car, but I did it the day I signed for her at a dealership in Midrand, and the name stuck for four years. She was a little blue Polo Vivo, second hand but barely, with cloth seats that smelled faintly of the previous owner's air freshener for about a month before they smelled like me. She was the first thing I ever bought entirely on my own, no co signer, no help from my mother, nothing. I was twenty seven when I got her and I remember sitting in the parking lot outside the dealership just holding the steering wheel and feeling like an actual adult for the first time.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Year the Sky Turned Brown Over Our Gate. AI-Generated.
The gate we were so proud of When my husband Pieter and I bought the little plot on the district road, the first thing we did was paint the gate. A soft green, the colour of new mielies, and I remember standing back with the brush still in my hand thinking that this was ours now, this scrap of land and the crooked pepper tree and the tin-roofed room we were going to turn into a farmstall. We had saved for years. I had waitressed, he had driven a delivery truck, and the plan was simple. Sell jam and bread and cold drinks to the people passing through, and rent out the two back rooms to travellers who wanted a quiet night away from the towns.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Chair, The Basin, And The Leg That Wouldn't Let Me Work. AI-Generated.
Twenty-two years standing up I have been cutting hair since I was seventeen. I did my training above a chemist on the Ballymount side, sweeping other people's clippings off the floor and making tea for women who wanted to talk about their sons, and by the time I was twenty I had my own chair. These days I work in a busy salon just off the Monastery Road in Clondalkin, the kind of place where the door never really stops going and the kettle is on from the minute we open. On a Saturday I might do fourteen heads. Colours, blow-dries, a wedding party if we are unlucky, three generations of the one family who all book in together and argue the whole way through.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Barn That Taught Me to Ride. AI-Generated.
When my grandfather died in the spring, he left me the farmstead the way a man leaves you a thumbprint. It was not much on paper. A low house with a tin roof that sang in the rain, a stretch of paddock gone to thistle, a well with a hand pump, and the old dairy barn standing at the edge of the yard like something that could not decide whether to fall now or wait until we were watching. I am forty three years old, and I had not slept a night on that land since I was a boy. Walking back into the yard with my own children behind me felt like stepping into a photograph and finding it still warm.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Night the Groundsheet Won and I Finally Looked Up. AI-Generated.
The wet night that broke me I am fifty two years old, and for most of my life I have believed that a proper night in the veld happens on the ground, with a thin foam mat, a sleeping bag that smells faintly of every fire it has ever sat next to, and a tent that you swear at while you peg it in the wind. I grew up like that. My father camped like that. When I was young I could sleep on gravel and wake up whistling. That was the deal I made with myself, and I was too proud to admit the deal had quietly expired.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Night the Kitchen Table Gave Up. AI-Generated.
How the garage became a workshop I spent thirty-one years as a mechanical fitter. My hands know the weight of a spanner better than they know how to hold a pen, and for most of my working life I fixed things that other people built. Pumps, gearboxes, the odd conveyor that had seized because nobody thought to grease it. So when I retired, my wife assumed I would sit in the garden and grow tomatoes. I lasted about four months before the quiet started to itch.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Drop That Nearly Landed in a Learner's Eye. AI-Generated.
Inheriting Someone Else's Silence When Mr Venter retired at the end of the fourth term, the school gave me his classroom, his register, and the keys to the prep room off the side of the science block. I had been teaching physical sciences for six years by then, most of them at a school in Kempton Park where I shared a lab with two other teachers and never once had a cupboard to call my own. So when I stood in the doorway of that prep room in Boksburg on a hot January morning, with the smell of old reagents and dust in my nose, I felt something close to pride. This was mine now. My little kingdom of beakers and Bunsen burners.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
The Long Way Home to Look After Gogo. AI-Generated.
The phone call that turned the car around I was standing in my kitchen in Observatory when my aunt phoned. She did not say hello. She just said Gogo had fallen in the yard, near the water tank, and that she had been lying there for a while before the neighbour heard her calling. My aunt is a practical woman and even she was crying, which is how I knew it was serious.
By Josh Maraney3 months ago in Journal
