Dewey: the Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World

by Vicki Myron

  Max II was the first admission Mom was going to die. Not from Dad. My mother was so strong, Dad believed she could survive anything. The admission came from Mom. She knew this illness was the one to beat her, and she didn’t want Dad to be alone.

  Mom was a force of nature. I suspect she started out running from life, from her alcoholic father and the long hours she worked in the family restaurant, even as a five-year-old child. When my grandmother divorced, she and Mom took jobs in a women’s clothing store. That was her life, her future, until she met Dad.

  After she met Verlyn Jipson, Marie Mayou turned around and spent every moment running toward life. My mother and father loved each other deeply. Their love was so great it can’t be contained in this or any book. They loved their children. They loved to sing and dance. They loved their friends, their town, their lives. They were great ones for celebrations. They would throw a party for every accomplishment and milestone. Mom would get up early to do the cooking, and she’d stay up until three in the morning when everyone finally left. At six the next morning, she’d start cleaning. By eight, the house was immaculate. Mom’s house was always immaculate.

  Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer in the early 1970s. The doctors gave her no chance to live, but she beat it. She beat it not once but five times, twice in one breast and three times in the other. She beat it with a whole lot of strength and a whole lot of faith. My friend Bonnie and I used to call Mom “the number two Catholic in the world.” When Jodi was eight, she and I were riding our bikes in Hartley when we happened to pass the small building that used to house St. Joseph Catholic Church. Mom had been on the planning committee for the new building, and the two trees in front were planted in memory of Steven and David. Jodi looked at the old wooden building and said, “Mom, was Grandma as crazy about church when you were growing up as she is now?”

  “Yes,” I told her, “she sure was.”

  Mom’s faith came from the church, but her strength came from inside. She simply wouldn’t give in to anything. Not pain, not tiredness, not sorrow. When Mom fought her third bout with breast cancer, her stepmother, Lucille, drove her every day to Sioux City, four hours round-trip, for eight weeks. Radiation treatment in those days was much worse than it is today. They basically blasted you until your body couldn’t take any more. Mom was burned to a crisp. She had an open wound the size of a large pancake under her arm, and it was so chewed up Dad would get physically sick when he changed the bandages. After more than twenty years in Hartley, my parents were retiring to a house on the lake. Dad wanted to postpone the move, but Mom wouldn’t hear of it. She came home from Sioux City every night and cooked, cleaned, then packed boxes until she fell asleep, dead tired. In the middle of radiation treatment, she organized an auction to sell off most of the possessions she and Dad had gathered in a lifetime. The auction took two days, and Mom was there to say good-bye to every last spoon.

  Mom raised me to have that kind of strength. She knew there were no promises in life. Even when things went well, they never went easy. Mom raised six children, and she didn’t have a bathroom in the house or running water until the fifth one, my sister, Val. She had boundless energy but limited time. She had chores, meals to cook, a house full of children, her chicken and egg business, and an entire community of local kids who thought of her as their mother. Mom never turned anyone away. If a child needed a meal, he’d sit with us at our table. If a family was struggling and she knew their little one liked peanut butter, the jar of peanut butter would disappear from our pantry. She had room in her heart for everyone, which didn’t leave much time for any one person. Most of the time I spent with Mom growing up, I was working beside her. I was her alter ego, her other half, which was both a treasure and a burden. When Val arrived at the house after Steven’s death, Mom and Dad ran out to hug her, and they all cried together. When I arrived, Dad hugged me and cried. Mom hugged me and said, “Don’t you cry. You have to be strong.” Mom knew if I was strong, she could be, too. And I knew what was expected of me.

  Mom said she loved me all the time. There was never any doubt about that. Dad was the sentimental one; Mom showed her love through pride. She cried at my college graduation when she saw my summa cum laude sash. She was that proud of me for kicking off the shackles, standing up, and walking. That was her adult daughter up there, and in a way, that was her up there, too. A college graduate. With honors.

  Dad couldn’t attend my graduation because he was working, so my parents threw a graduation party for two hundred people back in Hartley. Dad had worked for a month to make me an apron out of a hundred one-dollar bills. One hundred dollars was a huge amount of money for my parents. In those days you were considered rich if you had two five-dollar bills to rub together. I loved that apron. It represented Dad’s love and pride, just like Mom’s tears. But I was so poor, it lasted only a week before I took it apart and spent it.

  When my mother rallied from leukemia, no one was surprised. She had survived breast cancer five times, after all, and she was a fighter. She was on radiation treatments for years, but they never broke her. When radiation stopped working, she switched to IGG, in which parts of someone else’s immune system are injected into your body. She’d have good periods, but eventually it became clear she wasn’t going to win this time. She was almost eighty years old, and her strength was running out.

  Mom wanted a huge party for her wedding anniversary, which was still months away. The biggest parties of our lives were for Mom and Dad’s anniversaries. We four remaining children put our heads together. We didn’t think Mom was going to make it to her anniversary, and besides, in her condition a huge party was out of the question. We decided to throw a small party for Mom’s seventy-ninth birthday, which was only three days before Dad’s eightieth birthday, just the family and a few close friends. The Jipson Family Band got together one last time and played “Johnny M’Go.” All the children wrote poems in honor of Mom and Dad. Poems are a Jipson family tradition. Dad wrote poetry at the drop of a hat. We made fun of him for it, but we kept his poems framed on our walls or buried in our drawers, always within arm’s reach.

  The children agreed the poems would be silly. Here’s the poem I wrote for Dad. It refers all the way back to the time I broke my engagement just out of high school.

  MEMORIES OF DAD

  I had broken my engagement,

  John and I would never marry.

  It was the hardest thing I’d every done,

  Emotional and scary.

  Mom was quite upset,

  What would the neighbors say?

  I shut myself up in my room

  To cry the pain away.

  Dad could hear my sobs;

  This was the solace he gave:

  Leaning on my doorknob, he said,

  “Honey, do you want to come and watch me shave?”

  But I couldn’t write a silly poem for Mom. She had done too much for me; there was too much to say. Would I get another chance? I broke down and wrote the kind of poem Dad was famous for, the awkwardly sentimental kind.

  MEMORIES OF MOM

  When I began to pick a memory,

  One day, one incident, one chat,

  I realized my fondest memory

  Had more substance than that.

  The 70s lost my marriage—lost everything,

  I could feel my life unwind.

  I was depressed and struggling,

  Quite literally losing my mind.

  Friends and family got me through,

  But with a daughter under five,

  Jodi paid for all my pain

  As I struggled to survive.

  Thank God for Mom.

  Her strength showed I could recover,

  But her most important role

  Back then was Jodi’s second mother.

  When I had no more to give,

  When I fought to get out of bed,

  Mom took Jodi in her arms

  And kept her soul fed.

  Unconditional love
and stability

  In that Hartley home;

  Swimming lessons, silly games,

  Jodi didn’t have to be alone.

  While I built my life back,

  Studied, worked, and found my way,

  Mom gave Jodi what I missed,

  Special attention every day.

  I was a mess while raising Jodi,

  But when she fell, you caught her.

  So, thank you, Mom, most of all

  For helping shape our daughter.

  Two days after the party, Mom woke Dad in the middle of the night and told him to drive her to the hospital. She couldn’t take the pain anymore. A few days later, after she had been stabilized and sent to Sioux City for tests, we discovered Mom had colorectal cancer. Her only chance for survival, and it was no guarantee, was to remove almost her entire colon. She’d have to spend the rest of her life with a colostomy bag.

  Mom had known something was seriously wrong. We found out later she had been taking suppositories and laxatives for more than a year, and she had been in almost constant pain. She hadn’t wanted anyone to know. For the first time in her life, Mom didn’t want to face down her enemy. She said, “I’m not going to have the surgery. I’m tired of fighting.”

  My sister was distraught. I told her, “Val, this is Mom. Give her time.”

  Sure enough, five days later Mom said, “I don’t want to go this way. Let’s have the surgery.”

  Mom survived the surgery and lived another eight months. They were not easy months. We brought Mom home, and Val and Dad took care of her around the clock. Val was the only one who learned to manage the colostomy bag; even the nurse couldn’t change it as well. I came over every night and cooked dinner for them. Difficult times, but also some of the best of my life. Mom and I talked about everything. There was nothing left unsaid. There was no laugh we didn’t share. She slipped into a coma near the end, but even then I knew she heard me. She heard all of us. She was never too far away. She died as she had lived, on her own terms, with her family at her side.

  In the summer of 2006, a few months after she died, I placed a small statue outside the window of the children’s library in my mother’s honor. The statue is of a woman holding a book, ready to read to the child clamoring around her. To me, that statue is Mom. She always had something to give.

  Chapter 24

  Dewey’s Diet

  Dad says Max II, his beloved Himalayan, will outlive him. He finds comfort in that certainty. But for most of us, living with an animal means understanding we will experience our pet’s death. Animals are not children; rarely do they outlive us.

  I had been mentally preparing for Dewey’s death since he was fourteen years old. His colon condition and public living arrangement, according to Dr. Esterly, made it unlikely Dewey would live longer than a dozen years. But Dewey had a rare combination of genetics and attitude. By the time Dewey was seventeen, I had nearly stopped thinking about his death. I accepted it not so much as inevitable but as another milestone down the road. Since I didn’t know the location of the marker, or what it would look like when we got there, why spend time worrying about it? That is to say, I enjoyed our days together, and during our evenings apart I looked no further than the next morning.

  I realized Dewey was losing his hearing when he stopped responding to the word bath. For years, that word had sent him into a scamper. The staff would be talking, and someone would say, “I had to clean my bathtub last night.”

  Bam, Dewey was gone. Every time.

  “That isn’t about you, Dewey!”

  But he wasn’t listening. Say the word bath—or brush or comb or scissors or doctor or vet—and Dewey disappeared. Especially if Kay or I said the dread word. When I was away on library business or out sick, as I often was with my immune system so compromised by surgeries, Kay took care of Dewey. If he needed something, even comfort or love, and I wasn’t around, he went to Kay. She may have been distant at first, but after all those years she had become his second mother, the one who loved him but wouldn’t tolerate his bad habits. If Kay and I were standing together and even thought the word water, Dewey ran.

  Then one day someone said bath and he didn’t run. He still ran when I thought bath, but not at the word. So I started to watch him more closely. Sure enough, he had stopped running away every time a truck rumbled by in the alley behind the library. The sound of the back door opening used to send him sprinting to sniff the incoming boxes; now, he wasn’t moving at all. He wasn’t jumping at sudden loud noises, such as someone setting down a large reference volume too fast, and he wasn’t coming as often when patrons called.

  That, however, might not have had much to do with hearing. When you get older, the simple things are suddenly not so simple. A touch of arthritis, discomfort in the muscles. You thin out and stiffen up. In both cats and humans, the skin gets less elastic, which means more flaking and irritation and less ability to heal. These are not small things when your job is, essentially, to be petted all day.

  Dewey still greeted everyone at the front door. He still searched out laps, but on his own terms. He had arthritis in his back left hip, and jostling him in the wrong place or picking him up the wrong way would cause him to limp away in pain. More and more in the late morning and afternoon he sat on the circulation desk, where he was protected by staff. He was supremely confident in his beauty and popularity; he knew patrons would come to him. He looked so regal, a lion surveying his kingdom. He even sat like a lion, with his paws crossed in front of him and his back legs tucked underneath, a model of dignity and grace.

  The staff started quietly suggesting that patrons be gentle with Dewey, more aware of his comfort. Joy, who spent the most time out front with the patrons, became very protective of him. She often brought her nieces and nephews to see Dewey, even on her days off, so she knew how rough people could be. “These days,” she would tell the patrons, “Dewey prefers a gentle pat on the head.”

  Even the elementary school children understood Dewey was an old man now, and they were sensitive to his needs. This was his second generation of Spencer children, the children of the children Dewey had gotten to know as a kitten, so the parents made sure their kids were well behaved. When the children touched him gently, Dewey would lie against their legs or, if they were sitting on the floor, on their laps. But he was more cautious than he used to be, and loud noise or rough petting often drove him away.

  “That’s all right, Dewey. Whatever you need.”

  After years of trial and error, we had finally found our finicky cat an acceptable cat bed. It was small, with white fake fur sides and an electric warmer in the bottom. We kept it in front of the wall heater outside my office door. Dewey loved nothing more than lounging in his bed, in the safety of the staff area, with the heating pad turned all the way up. In the winter, when the wall heater was on, he got so warm he had to throw himself over the side and roll around on the floor. His fur was so hot you couldn’t even touch it. He would lie on his back for ten minutes with all his legs spread out, venting heat. If a cat could pant, Dewey would have been panting. As soon as he was cool, he climbed back into his bed and started the process all over again.

  Heat wasn’t Dewey’s only indulgence. I may have been a sucker for Dewey’s whims, but now our assistant children’s librarian, Donna, was spoiling him even more than I did. If Dewey didn’t eat his food right away, she heated it in the microwave for him. If he still didn’t eat it, she threw it out and opened another can. Donna didn’t trust ordinary flavors. Why should Dewey eat gizzards and toes? Donna drove to Milford, fifteen miles away, because a little store there sold exotic cat food. I remember duck. Dewey was fond of that for a week. She tried lamb, too, but as usual nothing stuck for very long. Donna kept trying new flavor after new flavor and new can after new can. Oh, how she loved that cat.

  Despite our best efforts, though, Dewey was thinning down, so at his next checkup Dr. Franck prescribed a series of medicines to fatten him up. That’s right, despit
e the dire health warnings, Dewey had outlasted his old nemesis, Dr. Esterly, who retired at the end of 2002 and donated his practice to a nonprofit animal advocacy group.

  Along with the pills, Dr. Franck gave me a pill shooter which, theoretically, shot the pills far enough down Dewey’s throat that he couldn’t spit them out. But Dewey was smart. He took his pill so calmly I thought, “Good, we made it. That was easy.” That’s when he snuck behind a shelf somewhere and coughed it back up. I found little white pills all over the library.

  I didn’t force Dewey’s medicine on him. He was eighteen; if he didn’t want medicine, he didn’t have to take it. Instead, I bought him a container of yogurt and started giving him a lick every day. That opened the floodgates. Kay started giving him bites of cold cuts out of her sandwiches. Joy started sharing her ham sandwich, and pretty soon Dewey was following her to the kitchen whenever he saw her walk through the door with a bag in her hand. One day Sharon left a sandwich unwrapped on her desk. When she came back a minute later, the top slice of bread had been carefully turned over and placed to the side. The bottom slice of bread was sitting exactly where it had been, untouched. But all the meat was gone.

  After Thanksgiving of 2005, we discovered Dewey loved turkey, so the staff loaded up on holiday scraps. We tried to freeze them, but he could always tell when the turkey wasn’t fresh. Dewey never lost his keen sense of smell. That’s one reason I scoffed when Sharon offered Dewey a bite of garlic chicken, her favorite microwavable lunch. I told her, “No way Dewey is going to eat garlic.”

  He ate every bite. Who was this cat? For eighteen years, Dewey ate nothing but specific brands and flavors of cat food. Now, it seemed, he’d eat anything.