I just got off the phone with my mother. She told of the antics of my sister's cat, whom my sister brought home over Easter. My sister's had Kitty (sadly, not an alias: no one has been able to come up with a better name) for maybe two months now and brought her home twice. Our mother persistently refers to the cat as "he." Of course it doesn't really matter: the cat is asexual. And it's not as if "Kitty" as a name offers any clues about gender. But still. Is it just me? Is remembering this so difficult? We anthropomorphize our pets--I wrote "whom" instead of "which" automatically, and so would my mother except she'd say "who"--in so many ways that this should be one. At her first masculine pronoun I interjected "she," possibly rudely, but in a way that almost anyone else I know would have run with ("'She,' right, as I was saying, loves to birdwatch..."). My mother instead required a tangent excusing herself. Perhaps she does this to dissuade me from interrupting her or from correcting her at all. Perhaps she is just incapable of learning or remembering: if I ever correct her again (and I will), she will not remember--any more than she remembers the cat's gender--that she already explained herself (twice now).
Her excuse is that all cats in the house--Granny's exSqueaky, her husband's exMurray--were male. So? All the dogs except Stanley, who was a package deal with my father, were female. Knowing the cat's gender is a part of knowing the cat, and her inability to grasp this simple fact illustrates another reason I'm glad not to have spored: if I had a son, would she never remember his gender because there ever were only girls in her house?
I told her about Howie the Dog though. She appreciated that. But I forgot to tell her that my friend's year-old baby's first utterances have been barking.