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

“The mug is six inches deep. It’s full of paper clips, staples, pen, pencils. How could he possibly pluck out rubber bands without knocking everything over?”

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way. And this suspect has proven, in his eight months at the library, that he has the will.”

“But there are hardly any rubber bands in there! Surely this isn’t his only source!”

“How about an experiment? You put the mug in the cabinet, we’ll see if he pukes rubber bands near your desk.”

“But this mug has my children’s pictures on it!”

“Good point. How about we just remove the rubber bands?”

Mary decided to put a lid on the mug. The next morning, the lid was lying on her desk with suspicious teeth marks along one edge. No doubt about it, the mug was the source. The rubber bands went into a drawer. Convenience was sacrificed for the greater good.

We never completely succeeded in wiping out Dewey’s rubber band fixation. He’d lose interest, only to go back on the prowl a few months or even a few years later. In the end, it was more a game than a battle, a contest of wits and guile. While we had the wits, Dewey had the guile. And the will. He was far more intent on eating rubber bands than we were on stopping him. And he had that powerful, rubber-sniffing nose.

But let’s not make too much of it all. Rubber bands were a hobby. Catnip and boxes were mere distractions. Dewey’s true love was people, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do for his adoring public. I remember standing at the circulation desk one morning talking with Doris when we noticed a toddler wobbling by. She must have recently learned to walk, because her balance was shaky and her steps uneven. It wasn’t helping that her arms were wrapped tightly across her chest, clutching Dewey in a bear hug. His rear and tail were sticking up in her face, and his head was hanging down toward the floor. Doris and I stopped talking and watched in amazement as the little girl toddled in slow motion across the library, a very big smile on her face and a very resigned cat hanging upside down from her arms.

“Amazing,” Doris said.

“I should do something about that,” I said. But I didn’t. I knew that, despite appearances, Dewey was completely in control of the situation. He knew what he was doing and, no matter what happened, he could take care of himself.

We think of a library, or any single building really, as a small place. How can you spend all day, every day, in a 13,000-square-foot room and not get bored? But to Dewey, the Spencer Public Library was a huge world full of drawers, cabinets, bookshelves, display cases, rubber bands, typewriters, copiers, tables, chairs, backpacks, purses, and a steady stream of hands to pet him, legs to rub him, and mouths to sing his praises. And laps. The library was always graciously, gorgeously full of laps.

By the fall of 1988, Dewey considered all of it his.

Chapter 6

Moneta

Size is a matter of perspective. For an insect, one stalk of corn, or even one ear of corn, can be the whole world. For Dewey, the Spencer Public Library was a labyrinth that kept him endlessly fascinated—at least until he started to wonder what was outside the front door. For most of the people in northwest Iowa, Spencer is the big city. In fact, we are the biggest city for a hundred miles in any direction. People from nine counties funnel into Spencer for entertainment and shopping. We have stores, services, live music, local theater, and, of course, the county fair. What more do you need? If there was a front door leading from Grand Avenue to the rest of the world, most people around here wouldn’t have any interest in going through it.

In junior high school, I remember being scared of girls from Spencer, not because I’d ever met any but because they were from the big city. Like most people around here, I grew up on a farm. My great-great-aunt Luna was the first schoolteacher in Clay County. She taught class out of a one-room sod house. There have never been trees out here on the prairie, so the settlers built with what they could find: grass. Roots, soil, and all. My great-grandfather Norman Jipson was the one who amassed enough land to grant a farmstead to each of his six children. No matter where I went as a kid, I was surrounded by my father’s family. Most of the Jipsons were staunch Baptists, and they didn’t wear pants. All right, the men wore pants. Religiously. The women wore dresses. I never saw a pair of slacks on any woman on my father’s side.