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Mischief is gone. [1]
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Date: 2025-01-03
I brought a half-grown kitten home to foster on Valentine’s Day 2007, a handsome tuxedo with one gold eye and one green eye, big whiskers, and a head and tail he hadn’t quite grown into yet. He panicked when my 12 year old brown tabby twice his size headed over to say hello, so he squeezed himself into an improbably tiny space under a dresser, then hid under several other pieces of furniture for a while, with the big cat interestedly following him around. It didn’t take long for him to correctly deduce that Shadow was a harmless sweetheart, and settle down with him for a nap within a day.
Shadow and Mischief, first nap together.
You can see their characters and dynamic from the first picture. It never changed. They got along great and he was always the teasing little brother, coming around to tackle his older companion about forty-two times an hour, including most every time the old guy settled down to drink water. Shadow, being sweet but not the sharpest tool in the shed, never saw it coming, but he loved the little rascal anyway. After a few weeks I named the spicy young tuxedo Mischief, and made the adoption official.
One treasured memory: he found a disposable plastic fork on the dining table, hit the tines, saw it bounce up and then land on the carpet, and figured out he could keep hitting the tines or the handle (whichever was poking up) to make it bounce and dance away, over and over again. He took that fork about fifty feet, from the dining room to my master bedroom closet, inside of five minutes.
He was very savvy about the use of positioning and was a champion hinter. He'd never wake you and seldom meow, but would silently indicate his wants by posing at the door or requested item and looking at you, or getting on the bed & staring once you woke up, or pulling his too-empty dishes out of position to call attention to them. Of course this resulted in a fair bit of damp floor whenever I unwisely walked into the kitchen without looking and suddenly found the water dish two feet out of place, but you have to train the servants somehow, and no great harm was done.
He made it his life’s work to sniff and inspect all incoming bags and shoes, thereby earning the nickname “Mr TSA”. Also all incoming merchandise, after I started a small thrift shop in our NYC apartment in 2012. He became co-proprietor and is listed on my business cards as such. Fortunately he was playful but not destructive, and delicate in his movements. Only cat I know who you could trust to walk around on a table full of glassware and not knock anything over.
Inspecting a newly arrived coffee table for sale. (You can never plan a shot this perfect, you can only get lucky, but he really was graceful.)
The one time he and his younger companion were tussling, and knocked over and broke a big bowl the youngster liked to curl up in, he looked at me with an expression unique in my nearly forty years of experience living with cats: he appeared genuinely sorry and apologetic.
Mischief grew up surprisingly well-behaved, despite his name. He made life interesting for Shadow and likely gave him enough exercise and excitement to prolong his life noticeably. Alas, no pet lives forever. Mischief sat with him at the end and looked at me as if to say, “Can’t you do something, Mommy?” But it was no use. I had to put Shads to sleep in 2013 at the age of nineteen.
One of Shadow’s last days.
Ten days later, I foolishly went looking at the City Critters foster cat cages again, and got immediately smitten with a tan tabby kitten. I assumed introduction would be easy as all my previous pairs had gotten along very quickly, To my surprise, Mischief was a bit resistant. Either he was still in mourning, or he was thinking, “The old guy told me I would inherit free and clear. What is THAT doing here?!?” He did warm up to the youngster eventually—no one can resist Caramel’s incessantly friendly charm offensive for long, in my experience—but it took a few weeks to be sure.
One good early sign was when I spotted Mischief and the new arrival sitting together by the apartment door, looking back at me expectantly. I took the hint and opened the door, and the two of them went out and explored the hallway together. He hadn’t let Shadow out in the hallway in seven years, but he apparently sized up the new youngster and soon decided he’d make a good trainee in hallway security.
Mischief suddenly matured from the antic younger brother he had been for the first seven years, and became the older brother mentor and teacher damn near overnight. Despite a relatively slow start, they bonded within a few weeks, closer than any other pair I’ve had, and napped together a lot. This was one of the first times.
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You can see both of their characters in my profile pic: Mischief a little bit reticent, Caramel up for anything anytime, and the two of them thick as thieves. Caramel is the more universally friendly, but his affection seems nonspecific. If I go out of town, blondie is all casual and “oh, hi” when I get back--he likes any live-in catsitter just as much--whereas the tuxedo was more loving, really missed me, and would be practically glued to my side for a few days upon my return.
Mischief was always willful. You had to take him on his own terms, which were few and simple. He was very curious and always wanting to explore. He was friendly and pettable and liked most people, but you could never put him on your lap and expect him to stay: he had to be the one to decide to get on you, and when he did, you knew it was a real compliment. You could normally trust him not to steal food from table or counter, but once he had been given fresh turkey or chicken, he considered they should always be tithed thereafter. Occasionally he would lay with his belly exposed, but it was perilous to try to pet that cute Oreo belly fur. Took me over a decade to realize you could pet his belly just fine, but ONLY when he was standing up and felt free to leave. He always wanted his paws on the ground so he’d ready to run off to the next adventure. He did not like to be picked up or held for any length of time. He would not abide having his claws clipped. He particularly abhorred going to the vet: I’d have to put on long sleeves before putting him in the carrier or suffer multiple long scratches on my arms.
So he didn’t go to the vet for a long time, until he was seventeen and had grown alarmingly thin in a few months. We’d had a deal: “If you don’t get sick, I won’t take you to the vet.” He held up his end for a decade, but was now anemic and bordering on kidney failure. He got a new diet of special dry kidney food, which he enjoyed and which likely helped him survive a while longer. Tested again a year later (six months ago) with similar results. This combination killed my first cat, because while subcutaneous fluids help the kidneys, they worsen the anemia, and knocking off the fluids makes the kidneys worse. There is no escaping that scissor once the kidneys fail, and in any case, a cat who won’t allow himself to be held still for even thirty seconds is a terrible candidate for subQ.
He went badly downhill in the last month or so. No apparent pain, but increasingly raggedy-looking and much weaker. Since December 9th, he’d completely lost interest in greeting and inspecting visitors—a very bad sign--and only wanted to be on my bed, unless he was eating or drinking. I took to picking him up (with only token resistance to short rides by this time) and giving him express bus service to the food and water dishes. He’d trot back to bed rapidly once done eating or drinking, as long as he could still walk. I laid out disposable bedpads so he wouldn’t have to leave the bed to pee, and did far more laundry than normal when he missed the pads. Seriously considered taking him in for euthanasia, but didn’t want to panic him at the end with a traumatic trip, and really believed this independent, willful soul would rather go naturally on his own terms.
On December 31st, Mischief started refusing all food and water. He died quietly in my bed a few minutes before midnight on New Year’s Day. He will be sorely missed.
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