All photos supplied by the author is a Dublin-born scientist and writer who teaches at DePaul University in Chicago. His most recent book, a novel, is Through Pleated Light: Confessions and Translations (2024). The grandmother hypothesis is well known.
Grandmothers are said to improve evolutionary fitness, helping children survive and families endure across generations. I know a grandma who carries a spare diaper in her handbag. Then there’s the grandfather effect.
According to some anthropologists, grandads reduce the survivorship of offspring. When a grandad mooches around, his sons have fewer kids. We snooze, we’re odiferous, we eat too much – right out of the mouths of babes!
But if science has been slow to celebrate us, life has recently handed me a counterargument. Three years ago, when my granddaughter came home from the hospital, I committed myself to becoming what I now call a ‘full-service grandad’. One, called Danda, daily consumed fried bread and loved his rashers of bacon.
He would run with me up and down the length of Xavier Avenue in Dublin’s North Strand, and when the trains pulled out of the station, we paused to wave, up, up, up so high on the bridge at the end of that short street. The other grandfather, Grandy, smoked his pipe, or rather he prepared his pipe, shaving the plug of tobacco, stuffing the bowl, striking the match, and raising it aloft as he talked till it burned down to his fingers. His background was revolutionary, storyful, pious; the memories linger a half-century after he is gone.
Even before I became a grandfather, I looked the part. My hair greyed in my 30s and then whitened; my beard is billowy and snowy. My complexion, though not quite rosy, is a little pinkish.
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