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

Don’t get me wrong, everything wasn’t perfect with the Dew. Yes, he was a sweet and beautiful cat, and yes, he was extraordinarily trusting and generous, but he was still a kitten. He’d streak maniacally through the staff room. He’d knock your work to the floor out of pure playfulness. He was too immature to know who really needed him, and he sometimes wouldn’t take no for an answer when a patron wanted to be left alone. At Story Hour, his presence made the children so rambunctious and unpredictable that Mary Walk, our children’s librarian, banned him from the room. Then there was Mark, a large puppet of a child with muscular dystrophy. We used Mark to teach schoolchildren about disabilities. There was so much cat hair on Mark’s legs that we finally had to put him in a closet. Dewey worked all night until he figured out how to open that closet and went right back to sleeping on Mark’s lap. We bought a lock for the closet the next day.

But nothing compared to his behavior around catnip. Doris Armstrong was always bringing Dewey presents, such as little balls or toy mice. Doris had cats of her own, and like the consummate mother hen she always thought of Dewey when she went to the pet store for their litter and food. One day near the end of Dewey’s first summer, she quite innocently brought in a bag of fresh catnip. Dewey was so excited by the smell I thought he was going to climb her leg. For the first time in his life, the cat actually begged.

When Doris finally crumbled a few leaves on the floor, Dewey went crazy. He started smelling them so hard I thought he was going to inhale the floor. After a few sniffs, he started sneezing, but he didn’t slow down. Instead, he started chewing the leaves, then alternating back and forth: chewing, sniffing, chewing, sniffing. His muscles started to ripple, a slow cascade of tension flowing out of his bones and down his back. When he finally shook that tension out the end of his tail, he flopped over on the ground and rolled back and forth in the catnip. He rolled until he lost every bone in his body. Unable to walk, he slithered on the floor, undulating as he rubbed his chin along the carpet like a snowplow blade. I mean, the cat oozed. Then, gradually, his spine bent backward, in slow motion, until his head was resting on his behind. He formed figure eights, zigzags, pretzels. I swear the front half of his body wasn’t even connected to the back half. When he finally, and accidentally, ended up flat on his tummy, he rippled his way back to the catnip and started rolling in it again. Most of the leaves were by now stuck in his fur, but he kept sniffing and chewing. Finally he stretched out on his back and started kicking his chin with his back legs. This lasted until, with a few flailing kicks hanging feebly in the air, Dewey passed out right on top of the last of the catnip. Doris and I looked at each other in amazement, then burst out laughing. My goodness, it was funny.

Dewey never tired of catnip. He would often sniff halfheartedly at old, worn-out leaves, but if there were fresh leaves in the library, Dewey knew it. And every time he got hold of catnip, it was the same thing: the undulating back, the rolling, the slithering, the bending, the kicking, and finally one very tired, very comatose cat. We called it the Dewey Mambo.

Dewey’s other interest—besides puppets, drawers, boxes, copiers, typewriters, and catnip—was rubber bands. Dewey was absolutely fanatical about rubber bands. He didn’t even need to see them; he could smell them across the library. As soon as you put a box of rubber bands on your desk, he was there.

“Here you go, Dewey,” I would say as I opened a new bag. “One for you and one for me.” He would take his rubber band in his mouth and happily skip away.

I would find it the next morning . . . in his litter box. It looked like a worm poking its head out of a chunk of dirt. I thought, “That can’t be good.”

Dewey always attended staff meetings, but fortunately he wasn’t yet able to understand what we were talking about. A few years down the road that cat and I were able to have long philosophical conversations, but for right now it was easy to wrap up the meeting with a simple reminder. “Don’t give Dewey any more rubber bands. I don’t care how much he begs. He’s been eating them, and I have a feeling rubber isn’t the healthiest food for a growing kitten.”

The next day, there were more rubber band worms in Dewey’s litter. And the next. And the next. At the next staff meeting, I was more direct. “Is anyone giving Dewey rubber bands?”

No. No. No. No. No.

“Then he must be stealing them. From now on, don’t leave rubber bands lying out on your desk.”