I don’t remember how I got the two cats home from the show in one carrier! I must have had Bo in my lap for some portion of the hour-long drive. That wasn’t unusual; Bo rode home from his breeder in New York that way and I had a harness and leash for him as part of my show supplies. Maybe I carried Bo inside and my MOM ran the carrier past my dad and straight upstairs. I went downstairs to retrieve and clean up a cage for her while my mom and I guess my now-suspicious dad, let her out of the carrier in the spare room.

The first thing she did was hide! We all panicked and I thought for sure I had made a huge mistake bringing this cat home. But what could I do about it? Her breeders were well on their way back to Canada! We searched all over that room and even the hallways, thinking she might have run downstairs after me. No Gigi! There was a daybed in that room and after several minutes we found the little darling hiding on the bottom mattress!

It turned out that was a minor setback. She didn’t have much trouble settling in at all. The other cats didn’t even give her much grief. I guess after Ab and then Bo, they figured, “what’s one more!”.

“A Rose By Any Other Name...”

I decided early on not to change her callname because “Gigi” fit her to a T. I had a list of prospective cat names, song titles mostly, and the one I thought fit with Gigi was “Grand Illusion”. But with her prefix and my suffix, the name was too long, and a friend said, “Don’t name her that, in case she doesn’t grand!” After exhausting most of the “pink” song titles I could think of, and pink liquor and wine names, and even pink flower names to go with Nenuphar (an Egyptian word for “water lily”) I grabbed a handful of CDs and started reading the track listings in search of inspiration. Finally it hit, almost a whole day after she arrived

Eglantine (Rosa Eglanteria)

Eglantine! It was on a Styx CD I almost didn’t look at because I figured I knew it had no potential names on it, but as I stared at the words, “The Grove of Eglantine”, a light bulb went on and I remembered reading somewhere that Eglantine was a flower. I reached for the nearest dictionary, looked it up, and to my delight it proved me right. It was French, it was a flower, it was pink, it was just the right number of letters, it was a Styx song, IT WAS PERFECT!