Our journey back down the highway was lighter in mood than it had been on the way forward. The driver agreed with my observations about the woman in scarlet. He said he had seen some interesting sights at funerals but this was something that really took the cake. A woman in her sixties should not wear a slinky red crocheted dress unless she looks like Sophia Loren.
Jokes about Gina left me feeling more expansive in the Monaro�s cabin so I started probing our friendly driver�s private life again to see what other interesting facts I could dig up. I wasn�t disappointed. He said he loved animals. And it wasn�t just your normal household variety either. He kept a number of snakes in his house. The snakes had names and they accompanied him everywhere, whether it was on the couch or into bed. I had to wonder what the partner without a gender pronoun must think, especially when he saw the driver take frozen rats from the fridge, heat them up in the microwave and feed them to the �pets.�
Back in suburbia our driver dropped us off. I was pleased to get his phone number. But, as much as I liked his outgoing, friendly, even charming personality, I just couldn�t bring myself to call him. I like to make new friends but the thought of visiting him to find a snake crawling up my leg would have been uncomfortable. But I knew that for Kevin, who has an intense phobia of snakes, the combination of friendship with snakes would have been an impossible one.
But there would have been an even more insurmountable problem to making friends with the funeral car driver. What would I call his partner? It might sound a little old fashioned but I like to know the gender pronoun of my friends and their partners, whether they are gay men, straight women, trannies or even women that wear bright red dresses to a funeral. There�s enough ambiguity in the world without creating more confusion by leaving out personal pronouns.
