Science Confirms Grinch Virile, Studmuffin

The Grinch had another one of those eye-opening (slap-head, surely!) moments last week, blundering into a situation that could very easily have snuck up and bit his furry green butt rather mightily. Yes, weighing the consequences has never been his strong suit and the visit to the fertility specialist did not fail to entertain.
As noted in an earlier post, our Grinch is no spring chicken. Give the powerful desire for pups – and the unspoken wishes of the Missus - it was felt that a visit to the vet might be in order. A quick exam would ensure all the plumbing is behaving as it should, that decades of late nights, whiskey and cigarettes combined with chronic self-abuse had not critically abraded his ability to procreate.
Who knows what form these kinds of examinations take in the real world but the Grinch had naively thought the physician (who enjoys the mate’s complete confidence) might have a few questions. No so.
Here in Indonesia – where lotions and potions for all that ails ya are available on every street-corner and matters of conceptual prowess are a constant source of speculation amongst the chattering classes – he was instead greeted by a smiling, 50-something lab tech lady in the headscarf who kindly provided a specimen cup (plastic double-shot jigger with a yellow cap) and told to make sure it was returned “from home” within 30 minutes of having “provided a sample”.
Now the Grinch is expert in these matters but it struck him that unless his cave were right next door, the chances of that sample making it back to the lab in any condition to provide an accurate gauge of this his fertility were next to zero. Besides, even the Grinch is insufficiently ironic and post-modern to countenance a “post-production” ride in the back of a Silver Bird taxi from boudoir to clinic. Weird and wrong, but in a bad way.
So he carpe-d the diem, seized the sample jigger and disappeared into the heavily mirrored and extremely brightly lit, white-tiled bathroom sans naughty magazines or other visual aids and got busy. Always the consummate solitary professional (ibid: para 2), he was back in 10 minutes (take that, Dominos!): the head-scarved techie said it would only take a few minutes to analyze the sample.
And with those words, the oddest thought, something that might have been hovering, maddeningly and unidentified about the periphery of his consciousness, popped into full view: what if decades ingesting nasty chemicals HAD made an impact? What if the Grinch were to learn that no amount of spinach and prayer would produce a natural heir?
It had never really occurred to the Grinch that this might be the case. Not that there is a lack of evidence that infertility exists. In recent years several individuals in his immediate realm have discovered they are unable or highly unlikely to sire and have fallen back on adoption or in-vitro efforts, both emotionally fraught, time-consuming and expensive measures with no guarantee of success.
Though blessed with foster siblings, the Grinch is the last in his line. A failure to reproduce dooms one fragile genetic strand and its traits real and imagined (blue eyes, athleticism, long-windedness, appreciation for Spreyside single malts) to oblivion. It would be a lie to say that these issues keep the Grinch awake nights – there’s no crew filling these kinds of potholes on life’s road – but the possibility still elicits a visceral (genetic?) negative reaction that’s fodder for a robust nature/nurture argument at some point in the future.
For several minutes he sat shrouded in a dull mist on the outside the lab, considering for the first time what exactly was at stake, a leaden weight growing in my stomach. Because surely if anyone was going to be blindsided by a psychic roundhouse kick to the head it is your long-suffering Grinch, right?
A blue headscarf bobbed into view.
“Would you like to take a look,” she inquired, smiling?
“Huh?”
“A look in the microscope…?”
So he followed her into the lab greeted by half a dozen beaming techies in white lab coats. His mind accelerated… What do those smiles mean? Are these “So, the green fella’s the Kentucky stud farm breeder” smiles? Or are they “my village has been leveled by an earthquake and my entire family is dead” smiles? In Java one just never knows.
The microscope looms large. Ms Headscarf points to the barrels on either side to adjust focal lengths and angles… Her eyes are closer together than his so the first view was nothing but black.
When things cleared up the Grinch was privy to a bright, mottled universe populated by what appeared to be thousands of wriggling larvae, all busily going about the business of trying to get somewhere without any clear idea about where exactly “somewhere” might be. With apologies to Monty Python, a “100 Meter Dash for Tadpoles With No Sense of Direction.”
And the bulb literally snaps on.
“Holy smokes,” he thought, “they be Me! Or at least, part of Me. And look how many of Me there are! Swarms of little swimming, writhing Me’s all busily, mindlessly, fruitlessly trying to decide which way to go.”
Wrapped up the moment, the headscarf lady gave her thumbs-up.
It felt like the whole room was going to burst into applause (which would have been appropriate after all); certainly there was a conspicuous exhale, a decompression. The Missus confirmed matters for her own peace of mind, but talked the Grinch out of inviting the entire office in for a view, maybe selling tickets, doing a few interviews etc.
So the good news is that the Grinch’s status as a virile stud-muffin remains intact. Whether he’s actually learned anything from all this is up for debate. It seems likely he’ll continue to blithely blunder into these emotionally charged, potentially life-changing events clear-eyed and unreflective, almost childlike in his ignorance.