Ivy, our tuxedo cat, passed away this morning.
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Ivy's full name was Miss Ivy Turnstiles Smith-Perkette, a name which requires some explanation.
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We named her after Ivy Smith a character in the Bernstein-Comden/Green musical On the Town. The town, of course, is New York City in 1944. During the musical Ivy Smith is crowned "Miss Turnstiles":
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Ivy's full name was Miss Ivy Turnstiles Smith-Perkette, a name which requires some explanation.
Miss Turnstiles for June!Every month, some lucky little New York miss is chosen
Miss Turnstiles for the month. She's got to be beautiful,
she's got to be just an average girl, and most important
of all she's got to ride the subway.
There are 5,683 women who ride the subway every day. And
which fortunate lassie will be chosen for the signal honor this month?
She's beautiful, brilliant, average, a typical New Yorker...
Perkette? We had another tuxedo cat just before we got Ivy in July 2005. His name was Perky. For a while we couldn't keep ourselves from calling Ivy by the name Perky because they looked so much alike. We figured that the two of them must have been married in some previous life, or something, and we added the feminine form of Perky to her handle. Don't worry, it doesn't need to make any sense. Once we changed her name, of course, we never accidentally called her Perky again.
While Ivy may not have been particularly beautiful or brilliant, she certainly wasn't average, especially in the medical sense. Outwardly you could tell she was different because of her extra toe on each forepaw. The term for this is polydactylic.
There was more unusual about her than just extra toes. Although Ivy had been spayed not once but twice, she never stopped going into heat. Fortunately the frequency of her noisy episodes asking for a mate became less as she got older. Since she obviously had some ovaries inside even after two attempts to remove them, we guessed that her other internal organs must be abnormal as well. The vet diagnosed her final disease as congestive heart failure.
Ivy had been a stray, living near the home of our friends Dan and Lynn, who asked us to take her in. I doubt she would have survived too long on the street fending for herself. Here's Leslie holding Ivy just after she came to live with us.
While we never solved some of her behavior problems that drove us up a wall, Miss Ivy was a sweet and friendly little critter with magnificent whiskers. She made a good bed cat. We are happy that we could give her a home for almost eight years. During that time she became an essential part of our menagerie. We will miss her.
This final picture was taken less than a month ago.
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Click on the pictures for enlargements. There have been plenty of other Mixed Meters posts about our cats over the years. That's one of the essential reasons to have a blog.
This post also tells Ivy's story, in the comments.
A picture of Ivy in a drawer is here.
See Ivy's best whisker photo and listen to a piece of music called "In a Pissy Mood"here.
Or maybe this post has Ivy's best whisker photo.
.
Click on the pictures for enlargements. There have been plenty of other Mixed Meters posts about our cats over the years. That's one of the essential reasons to have a blog.
This post also tells Ivy's story, in the comments.
A picture of Ivy in a drawer is here.
See Ivy's best whisker photo and listen to a piece of music called "In a Pissy Mood"here.
Or maybe this post has Ivy's best whisker photo.
.