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

Dewey’s old friend Doris Armstrong still brought him little gifts and surprises, and she loved to dangle his beloved red Christmas yarn while he jumped with delight. She was as gregarious and charming as ever, but shortly after the library remodel she began to have severe attacks of vertigo. The doctors couldn’t determine the cause, so they guessed panic attacks. Then her hands began to tremble, and eventually she could barely put the covers on books. She no longer trusted herself to pet Dewey, but he didn’t mind. The more she trembled, the more he brushed his back against her arm and lounged on her desk to keep her company.

Then one morning Dewey ran into my office crying. This was unusual, but he was leading me toward his food bowl so I thought he wanted a snack. Instead, I found Doris lying on the floor of the staff room. She was having such a severe vertigo attack she couldn’t stand up. For days, she could barely eat she was so dizzy. The next time I found her on the floor, she not only had vertigo, but was sure she was having a heart attack. A few months later, Doris found a tiny black kitten. She brought the kitten to the library and, with trembling hands, held it out for me to hold. I could feel its heart racing and its lungs gasping for air. The kitten was weak, frightened, and sick.

“What should I do?” she asked me. I didn’t know.

The next day Doris came into the library crying. She had taken the kitten home with her, and it had died during the night. Sometimes a cat is more than an animal, and sometimes the loss you mourn is not just the obvious one. Dewey sat with Doris the whole day, and she even managed to lay her hands on him and pet him, but his presence didn’t soothe her. Not long after, Doris retired from the library and moved away to be near her family in Minnesota.

And yet, despite the changes, Dewey’s life stayed essentially the same. Children grew up, but there were always new ones turning four. Staffers moved on, but even on our skimpy budget we managed new hires. Dewey may never again have had a friend like Crystal, but he still met the special education class at the door every week. He even developed relationships with patrons like Mark Carey, who owned the electronics store on the corner. Dewey knew Mark wasn’t a cat lover, and he took fiendish delight in suddenly jumping on the table and scaring the bejeebers out of him. Mark took delight in kicking Dewey out of whatever chair he was lounging in, even if there was nobody else in the library.

One morning I noticed a businessman in a suit sitting at a table, reading the Wall Street Journal. It looked like he had stopped in to kill time before a meeting, so I wasn’t expecting to see a fluffy orange tail sticking out at his side. I looked closer and saw that Dewey had plopped down on one page of his newspaper. Busy. Businessman. On his way to a meeting. “Oh, Dewey,” I thought, “you’re pushing it now.” Then I realized the man was holding the newspaper with his right hand while petting Dewey with his left. One of them was purring; the other was smiling. That’s when I knew Dewey and the town had fallen into a comfort zone, that the general outline of our lives had been set, at least for the next few years.

Maybe that’s why I was so surprised when I arrived at the library one morning to find Dewey pacing. He was never agitated like that; even my presence didn’t calm him. When I opened the door, he ran a few steps, then stopped, waiting for me to follow.

“Do you need to go to the bathroom, Dewey? You know you don’t have to wait for me.”

It wasn’t the bathroom, and he didn’t have any interest in breakfast, either. He kept pacing back and forth, crying for me. Dewey never cried unless he was in pain, but I knew Dewey. He wasn’t in pain.

I tried fixing his food. Nope. I checked to see if he had poop stuck in his fur. Poop in his fur drove him absolutely nuts. I checked his nose to see if he had a temperature, and his ears to see if he had an infection. Nothing.

“Let’s make the rounds, Dew.”

Like all felines, Dewey had hair balls. Whenever it happened, our fanatically neat cat was mortified. But he had never acted this strangely, so I braced myself for the mother of all hair balls. I worked my way through fiction and nonfiction, checking every corner. But I didn’t find anything.

Dewey was waiting for me in the children’s library. The poor cat was in knots. But I didn’t find anything there, either.

“I’m sorry, Dewey. I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”

When the staff arrived, I told them to keep an eye on Dewey. I was extremely busy, and I couldn’t spend all morning playing charades with a cat. If Dewey was still acting strange in a few hours, I decided to take him to see Dr. Esterly. I knew he would love that.

Two minutes after the library opened, Jackie Shugars came back to my office. “You’re not going to believe this, Vicki, but Dewey just peed on the cards.”

I jumped up. “It can’t be!”