Cork Views: 'I'm blessed to share a special bond with my grandads despite our differences'

It hits me as we pass St Joseph’s Church and both instinctively bless ourselves one- handed. Today, my 89-year-old grandad is driving me to work, and I’m quite embarrassed about it.

My income as a freelance journalist is not always guaranteed, so in favour of working in a career I love, I’ve placed car ownership on hold. Grandad doesn’t mind, though, and laughs when I call him 20 minutes after I’ve arrived to make sure he got home okay.

Grandad O’Brien has never really gotten old, in my eyes. He launches himself at life with the determination of a young man still out on the pitch. When doctors told him to quit smoking, he went cold turkey after over 50 years of the habit. He was back driving three weeks after a knee replacement, and every day walks two laps of the Tank Field dressed smartly in his jumper and button-down.

I’m blessed to still have both my grandads, and to be able to maintain a relationship with them despite our inevitable differences.

It’s an exceptionally odd feeling to become an adult and realise that so much has changed that you have no choice but to help yourself. You can’t really ask for help when it comes to things like the job market, and trying to compare my milestones to that of my grandads’ at my age is spiral-inducing, as they were both married fathers.

It would be very easy for them to be dubious about the path I’ve chosen. Both place a great deal of worth on both education and job security - as do I, but I didn’t inherit their sporting talents or business knowledge.

Grandad O’Brien hurled for Glen Rovers when he was at school at North Mon. Thanks to his prowess, the school arranged for him to stay on until his final year so he could still play for them. If it wasn’t for sport, he wouldn’t have been able to pass his Leaving Cert in the 1950s.

One Christmas, he proudly presented me with a bracelet that once belonged to my late grandmother that I still don’t believe I am deserving enough to own. It contains five medals, dating from 1958 to 1962. They range from his county wins to a Munster Colleges win to a Harty Cup win.

Grandad O’Brien played (always wearing his cap) as a goalkeeper for Glen Rovers, and his hard-won achievements now hung off my wrist, as it once did on my grandmother’s. The act seemed to come so easy to him, despite setting myself and the rest of the room off into tears.

Grandad O’Brien is a stoic man who prefers to get on with whatever is thrown his way - but this cannot ever be mistaken as heartlessness. He has always loved so deeply. With an occasional slagging, yes, but that is out of love, too.

He and my late grandmother put their five boys through private school, later helping four through college, as he worked at the Coca-Cola factory until its closure. He was a car salesman after that, and accompanied dad to the dealership for an eloquent haggle when he bought his current car.

Though education has always been of great importance to him, Grandad O’Brien often checks in warily to see if I’m “thinking of adding another few letters to my name” through college. He sees the value in it, but is happier to see me out working, and honestly, so am I.

Next year he will be 90, and I imagine he will just shrug when it comes, perhaps suggesting a few pints.

On the other side of the coin, a running joke on my mom’s side of the family is that Grandad Larkin’s “bladder is very close to his eye”, and I assume that’s where I got my sentimentalism from. With mom’s help, he has tracked and scrapbooked his ancestors back to the 1800s. He tells stories that are so fantastically emotional that he cries, despite them being complete fiction. He shares my anxious squirrel brain, bursting into song at random intervals and speaking every thought out loud as it enters his head.

I visit him and my gran every Friday, as I have done since I was a baby, as I intend to do for whatever time we have together.

Grandad Larkin’s interests have also always been in sports - he played Gaelic football at club level with Douglas GAA, working his way up to win two Munster Minor Football Championships from 1960-1961. Before finding himself in a sports journalism career, he won an All Ireland Minor medal in 1961, marking the first time Cork took home the title.

Perhaps the reason Grandad Larkin has come to accept my long haul effort at a journalism career is because he sees part of his younger self in the way I work. He started off as a typesetter for the Cork Examiner, as it was then, individually inputting each letter to be printed for the next day’s paper. He worked his way up as a sports journalist, reporting on school matches, and eventually became an Hon. Uachtaráin of Douglas GAA club.

At a glance, we look like two people with nothing in common, but we both possess an ability to comfortably sit in silence, and incidentally, ask each other increasingly direct questions out of the blue over cups of tea.

He keeps his week’s worth of newspapers for me to look through, going out of his way to pick up the Farming Crossword for me each Thursday, and always greets me in the exact same way. In return, I fill him in on the details of my cousins’ budding love lives.

Last Christmas, I bought both my grandads a ‘directed memoir’ that had prompts for them to write about their lives. Grandad O’Brien has lived through every Irish President. Grandad Larkin has seen the world change a million times and put itself back together again, but still looks to me and my cousins with pride, even if he doesn’t fully understand us.

Of course, I want to make both of them proud, not just because of the legacies they’ve created, but because of the examples of good men they are. It’s a strange balance of compromising, overruling, adapting, accepting.

It all comes down to the mutual respect we have for each other, noting that what was easy for them is not the same for me now, and ultimately wanting me to build a legacy for myself that I am proud of.

So I sit in the car and tell Grandad O’Brien that the place I work in used to be a convent. He remembers it, and just like that, a connection is formed. There is some invisible string that combs through the years and generations between me and my grandads. They are my left and right brain.

Their relentlessness in pursuing what they wanted despite hardship was passed down to me. I may not understand a word of sports jargon, and they may not know what my poems are about, but I understand that every single time either of them takes me aside to tell me about something, it is a means of affection. An unspoken ‘what is important to you is important to me’, forever reversing. Hands outstretched across the years.