Mittsie and the Candelabra

This is one of my earliest memories. I was in the living room of our home, the one my parents bought right before I was born and has been in the family for the past 27 years. My mom was on the couch watching some TV program. I don’t recall which show it was.

To the left of the couch, on the wall beside the TV, we had a brick fireplace. At this time in the year, its mantle included a paper hand turkey and other school projects they had us do to celebrate Thanksgiving. My family used the fireplace off and on, but given it was a weeknight, it was dormant. However, my mom had always loved candles, so she had a candelabra burning on either end of the fireplace. Black iron with curving adornments about two feet tall.

Now, you might think that’s a bit dangerous to have around a child the same height, but somehow I never ended up burning myself or knocking them over. However, not all of us were that fortunate.

My parents always loved animals. They adopted their first cats their senior year at Michigan State University before they even married. I’ve been regaled of stories of cats and dogs I wasn’t born in time to meet, like Dusty, the cat who hunted lizards when my parents lived in Florida. It all seemed innocent and fun; anyone who’s been to Florida knows they have no lack of lizards. Then Dusty brought home a snake.

By the time my parents had moved to Virginia and I was around, the lineup had changed. There was Molly the golden retriever. Jackie, the elderly, dignified gray cat with velvety fur. Oreo, the skittish black and white cat (shocking with that name, I know). Nicholas, the orange tabby who massacred the neighborhood’s birds until the sparrows in the pines across the street issued “attack on sight” orders.

Fun sidebar: Nick loved to sun himself. To him, any piece of black asphalt was prime real estate, even in the high summer sun of Virginia. Inevitably, this included the street. There was at least one time that the sound of brakes screeching brought my parents running outside to find Nick sleepily looking up at the neighbor’s Jeep.

Also, Nick once came back home in the middle of a thunderstorm with a two-inch hole in his back leg. No joke. The vet said he probably got into a fight with a raccoon. But me being young and seeing the storm outside, I thought Nick had been hit by lightning. To be fair, if any cat could walk away from a lightning strike, it would have been Nick.

But enough about the greatest feline badass I’ll ever know. The final member of the extended family was Mittsie, a long-hair queen that must be descended from a Maine Coon. I mean, just look at her:

Mittsie was a friendly and, more importantly, forgiving cat, so we bonded more so than the other cats.

Nick was friendly, too, but he insisted on licking you if he cuddled and I hated that sandpaper tongue back then. Kids are petty, sorry.

Jackie was very affectionate, but she had very little tolerance for my antics of running to pet her. Kids are also dumb, sorry.

Naturally, the already skittish one, Oreo, would have nothing to do with me. I’m happy that he was around long enough for me to grow, mature, and calm down enough that we could have a relationship before he passed on.

Right, back to the “present.” Mom watching TV, me playing with toys, and Mittsie wandering on the periphery. Given she was the cat I was on the best terms with, I remember watching her step onto the raised bricks in front of the fireplace. She paused in front of the glass panes covering the fireplace, between the two lit candelabras.

Then, a centimeter at a time, the tip of her raised tail started to curve, forming a question mark. Until the end of that fluffy question mark grazed the candle flame.

Now, what’s the first thing they drilled into us children to do if we saw fire (or anything bad)? Tell an adult.

So I ran up to my mom and did just that: “Mom, the cat’s on fire!”

Her response: “That’s great, honey.”

Pause scene. That might sound bad but remember that I’m 4 or 5 years old. Young children talk. A lot. And a lot if it is nonsense. Even better, we tend to ask a lot of questions and exhaust our parents. So I was the proverbial boy that had cried wolf and desensitized my mom into assuming all my words were essentially meaningless.

But not this time. So I repeated: “The cat’s on fire! The cat’s on fire!”

This time the words succeeded in raising a flag. “Wait, what?”

Then she looks up in time to see Mittsie go racing past trailing smoke and yowling.

My mom whips around, spots a towel on the other couch, and springs into action. She sprints and dives on top of Mittsie, cloth spread wide to trap her and smother the flames.

Against the odds, Mittsie came out of the incident singed but otherwise unscathed. My parents moved those candelabras to a less dicey location, and I got to recount this story for years after at cafeteria lunch tables, Boy Scout campouts, and now here.

As for Mittsie, she lived to a ripe old age. In her later years, she broke with her Maine Coon ancestors by showing an extreme intolerance for the cold. She rectified that by crawling under the covers with me some nights. That might sound cute, but she was quick to inform me cuddles were not part of the deal by biting my hand when I tried to pet her. So sleeping with her in my bed was actually kind of stressful.

My final memory of Mittsie was watching her vomit all over the keyboard of my Lenovo Thinkpad. It was my grandfather’s old laptop that he had held onto when he upgraded and gave to me as a gift. I suppose that was Mittsie’s own parting gift; that computer never did work again. She had been sick for a while, and she went to the vet later that day for the last time.

Bonus Section: The Other Cats

Let’s decompress by taking a look at the other cast members featured in this tale.

Hopefully nobody else catches their tails on fire this holiday season. Happy Thanksgiving!