advice
Workplace advice for any issue, problem, or concern; from changing careers to co-working advice and decorating needs.
The Year I Learned to Give My Boy Some Sky. AI-Generated.
The Phone Call I Had Been Half Expecting Andile phoned me on a Tuesday in March, and I knew from the way he said "Ma" that something had cracked. He is thirty-one, my only son, and he had been doing well at a logistics firm in Roodepoort. Then the retrenchment letters went out, last in, first out, and my boy was on the wrong side of that line. He tried to keep his voice steady on the phone. I could hear him failing at it. I told him what any mother in this country would tell her child. Come home. We will sort it out.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
Somewhere Quiet Enough To Hear Myself. AI-Generated.
The morning I could not tell anyone about I remember the exact colour of the sky that morning, the flat grey you get over Johannesburg in early April before the winter properly arrives. I was twenty seven. I had a job I liked, a small flat in a block near Melville with a geyser that never quite behaved, and a life that, from the outside, looked settled. Inside I was anything but. I had spent three weeks carrying a piece of news that I had not said out loud to a single person, and the weight of it had started to change the way I moved through my own days.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Ladder on the Roof and the Boys Who Forgot to Complain. AI-Generated.
The two years I do not talk about much I am forty-six. For most of the last twenty of those years I have lived in Kempton Park, near enough to the airport that you stop hearing the planes after a while, the way you stop hearing your own worries until they get very loud. The last two years got very loud. Without going into all of it, there was a retrenchment I did not see coming, a marriage that thinned out slowly and then quickly, and a stretch of months where the most adventurous thing I did was drive to the same Spar for the same bread and stand in the same queue thinking about nothing.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Spring My Cakes Nearly Drowned Before They Reached the Table. AI-Generated.
How the garage became my whole life I never planned to run a business out of a garage. For years it was where my husband kept a lawnmower he barely used and where the Christmas decorations went to hibernate. Then I started baking for a friend's birthday, and then her sister's, and then a cousin's christening, and somewhere in all of that the requests stopped being favours and started being orders. People wanted to pay me. So we cleared out the mower and the tangled fairy lights, laid down a proper vinyl floor, brought in two secondhand fridges and a long stainless steel bench, and I painted the walls a soft cream because I thought it would look nice on the little photos I posted of my cakes.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Van, The Disc, And The Long Way Back to Myself. AI-Generated.
When your job is a chair with wheels I am forty-two and I have driven a delivery van around Dublin for the best part of eleven years, though I should probably spell that properly, eleven years, because the tiredness makes me sloppy these days. My round takes me out through Clondalkin most mornings, then loops toward the city, then back out again by the afternoon. I know the timing of the lights on the Naas Road better than I know some of my cousins. For a long time the job was just the job. You climb in, you climb out, you lift the parcels, you climb back in. Hundreds of times a day. I never once thought about my back. It was just there, holding me up, doing what backs do.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
What the Mountain Did With the Morning. AI-Generated.
The kettle that boiled for two For thirty-one years I made two cups of tea every morning before the sun cleared the roofline of our house in Bergvliet. One rooibos for Marta, no milk, a little honey she pretended she did not take. One strong Ceylon for me. When she died in the autumn of last year, I kept making both for eleven days without noticing. On the twelfth day I stood at the counter with the second mug in my hand and the steam going up past my face, and I understood that I had been pouring tea for a woman who was no longer coming through the door in her old green dressing gown. I put the mug down very carefully, as if it might break, though of course it was me that was breaking.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
Four Walls and a Kettle That Was Only Mine. AI-Generated.
The morning the shared house stopped working I had lived in shared houses for seven years before I understood that a home is not the same thing as a roof. There is a difference, and I learned it slowly, one shared kettle and one passive note on the fridge at a time.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
When The Paddling Pool Went Through The Floor. AI-Generated.
The afternoon it happened I taught primary school for thirty-one years, most of them at a little school out past Katoomba, and I always thought I understood how quickly a calm afternoon could turn. Twenty-eight children in a room will teach you that. But nothing prepared me for the sound our deck made that January, a sort of soft groan followed by a crack, the way a branch goes in a storm.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
The Garage My Uncle Named After Himself. AI-Generated.
The keys arrived in a shoebox When my Uncle Denton died, the solicitor handed me a shoebox that rattled. Inside were maybe forty keys, most of them unlabelled, a few with faded masking tape that said things like "back" or "the good padlock" in his blocky handwriting. Among them was the key to his double garage, which sat at the bottom of a sloping suburban plot he had lived on for thirty-one years. He had no children. My mother, his only sibling, had gone before him. So the plot, the tired little house, and the garage all landed in my lap when I was fifty-two and had absolutely no idea what to do with any of it.
By Josh Maraney4 months ago in Journal
