I noticed it first with the older patrons, who often came to the library to flip through magazines or browse for books. Once Dewey started spending time with them, they showed up more frequently and stayed longer. A few seemed better dressed, with more care given to their appearance. They had always given the staff a friendly wave or good morning, but now they engaged us in conversation, and that conversation was usually about Dewey. They couldn’t get enough Dewey stories. They weren’t just killing time now; they were visiting friends.
One older man in particular came in at the same time every morning, sat in the same big, comfortable chair, and read the newspaper. His wife had recently died, and I knew he was lonely. I didn’t expect him to be a cat person, but from the first moment Dewey climbed into his lap the man was beaming. Suddenly he wasn’t reading the newspaper alone. “Are you happy here, Dewey?” the man would ask every morning as he petted his new friend. Dewey would shut his eyes and, more often than not, drop off to sleep.
And then there was the man at the job bank. I didn’t know him personally, but I knew his type—proud, hardworking, resilient—and I knew he was suffering. He was from Spencer like most of the men who used the job bank, a laborer not a farmer. His job-hunting outfit, like his former work outfit, was jeans and a standard-issue shirt, and he never used the computer. He studied the résumé books; he looked through our job listings; he never asked for help. He was quiet, steady, unflappable, but as the weeks passed I could see the strain in the hunch of his back and the deepening lines on his always clean-shaven face. Every morning, Dewey approached him, but the man always pushed him away. Then one day I saw Dewey sitting on his lap, and for the first time in weeks the man was smiling. He was still bent, and there was still sadness in his eyes, but he was smiling. Maybe Dewey couldn’t give much, but in the winter of 1988 he gave exactly what Spencer needed.
So I gave our kitten to the community. The staff understood. He wasn’t our cat, not really. He belonged to the patrons of the Spencer Public Library. I put a box by the front door, right next to the job bank, and told people, “You know the cat who sits on your lap and helps with your résumé? The one who reads the newspaper with you? Who steals the lipstick out of your purse and helps you find the fiction section? Well, he’s your cat, and I want you to help name him.”
I had been library director for only six months, so I was still enthusiastic about contests. Every few weeks we put a box in the lobby, made an announcement on the local radio station, offered a prize for the winning entry, and tried to stoke interest in the latest bit of library news. A good contest with a good prize might draw fifty entries. If the prize was expensive, like a television set, we might scrape up seventy. Usually we got about twenty-five. Our Name the Kitty contest, which wasn’t mentioned on the radio because I wanted only regular patrons to participate, and which didn’t even offer a prize, received three hundred ninety-seven entries. Three hundred ninety-seven entries! That’s when I realized the library had stumbled onto something important. Community interest in Dewey was off all our charts.
Lasagna-loving Garfield was at the height of his popularity, so Garfield was a popular choice. There were nine votes for Tiger. Tigger was almost as popular. Morris was another multiple vote-getter, after the Nine Lives spokescat. Even cultural blips like ALF (a cuddly alien puppet with his own television show) and Spuds (after Spuds MacKenzie, the hard-drinking party dog of beer commercial fame) received votes. There were a few mean-spirited entries, like Fleabag, and some that tripped over the thin line between clever and weird, like Catgang Amadeus Taffy (a sudden sweet tooth?), Ladybooks (an odd name for a male cat), Hopsnopper, Boxcar, and Nukster.
By far the most entries, more than fifty, were for Dewey. Apparently the patrons had already grown attached to this kitten, and they didn’t want him to change. Not even his name. And to be honest, the staff didn’t, either. We, too, had grown attached to Dewey just the way he was.
Still, the name needed something. Our best option, we decided, was to think of a last name. Mary Walk, our children’s librarian, suggested Readmore. A commercial running during the Saturday morning cartoons—this was back when cartoons were only for children and shown only before noon on Saturdays—featured a cartoon cat named O. G. Readmore who encouraged kids to “read a book and take a look at the TV in your head.” I’m sure that’s where the name came from. Dewey Readmore. Close, but not quite. I suggested the last name Books.
Dewey Readmore Books. One name for the librarians, who live by the Dewey decimal system. One for the children. One for everyone.
Do We Read More Books? A challenge. A name to put us all in the mood to learn. The whole town was going to be well-read and well-informed in no time.
Dewey Readmore Books. Three names for our regal, confident, beautiful cat. I’m sure we’d have named him Sir Dewey Readmore Books if we had thought of it, but we were not only librarians, we were from Iowa. We didn’t stand on pomp and circumstance. And neither did Dewey. He always went by his first name or, occasionally, just “the Dew.”
Chapter 4
A Day in the Library
Cats are creatures of habit, and it didn’t take long for Dewey to develop a routine. When I arrived at the library every morning, he was waiting for me at the front door. He would take a few bites of his food while I hung up my jacket and bag, and then we would walk the library together, making sure everything was in place and discussing our evenings. Dewey was more a sniffer than a talker, but I didn’t mind. The library, once so cold and dead first thing in the morning, was alive and well.
After our walk, Dewey would visit the staff. If someone was having a bad morning, he’d spend extra time with her. Jean Hollis Clark had recently married and commuted forty-five minutes from Estherville to the library. You’d think that would frazzle her, but Jean was the calmest person you’ve ever met. The only thing that bothered her was the friction between a couple people on staff. She’d still be carrying the tension when she arrived the next morning, and Dewey was always there to comfort her. He had an amazing sense of who needed him, and he was always willing to give his time. But never for too long. At two minutes to nine, Dewey would drop whatever he was doing and race for the front door.
A patron was always waiting outside at nine o’clock when we opened the doors, and she would usually enter with a warm, “Hi, Dewey. How are you this morning?”
Welcome, welcome, I imagined him saying from his post to the left of the door. Why don’t you pet the cat?
No response. The early birds were usually there for a reason, which meant they didn’t have time to stop and chat with a cat.
No petting? Fine. There’s always another person where you came from—wherever that is.
It wouldn’t take long for him to find a lap, and since he’d been up for two hours that usually meant it was time for a quick nap. Dewey was already so comfortable in the library he had no problem falling asleep in public places. He preferred laps, of course, but if they weren’t available he would curl up in a box. The cards for the catalog came in small boxes about the size of a pair of baby shoes. Dewey liked to cram all four feet inside, sit down, and let his sides ooze over the edge. If the box was a little bigger, he buried his head and tail in the bottom. The only thing you could see was a big blob of back fur sticking out of the top. He looked like a muffin. One morning I found Dewey sleeping beside a box full of cards with one paw resting inside. It probably took him hours to reluctantly admit there wasn’t room for anything else.