In her 44th adventure at The Happy Store, Clementine’s mailman is a girl.

When Clementine Fraile asked her mother how she and her father met, Polly Fraile’s answer had a life-long effect on Clementine’s ability to sympathize with other people’s gender sensitivities.

She didn’t have any.

If she was called on to preside over a committee, she considered herself to be its chairman. When she and a bunch of school chums decided to make a short movie out of a script that she wrote, she became the film’s cameraman. Later, when it was entered into a national competition for young filmmakers, she was its front man.

And when confronted with pressure groups that considered words such as “human” to be sexist and lobbied to de-sexualize the identities of professions – actresses to become actors, waitresses to become waitpersons, stewardesses to become flight attendants and so on – her response was to laugh.

And it was all her father’s fault.

At least according to Polly (who died before Clementine quit her art director position at an advertising agency and got a very different job at The Happy Store).