Dewey's Nine Lives: The Legacy of the Small-Town Library Cat Who Inspired Millions, Page 2

  I read every card, letter, and e-mail. I wanted to respond, but there was no way to keep up with the volume, especially since I was often on the road, meeting Dewey’s fans. (But please rest assured, letter writers, that I bought those roses and that catnip for Dewey’s grave.) The sentiments expressed in the letters, and the way Dewey continued to change people’s lives, touched me more, I suspect, than these fans ever imagined.

  A young man who had suffered a devastating divorce and career setback that left him bitter and angry wrote to say that Dewey’s life “opened my heart.”

  A woman with severe MS told me how, after reading Dewey, she got down on the floor to kiss the head of the dog that lived in her group home. Afterward, she was unable to get back up without assistance, but she was happy she had done it, because the dog died a week later.

  A man in England wrote to say that he had lost his wife several years before. He realized only after he read Dewey that the two cats she left behind—two animals he had resented after her death—had actually carried him through. Without those cats to care for, he wrote, he would have been in a “black depression” he might never have endured.

  The letter from a young woman in Florida was typical. Just before reading Dewey, the young woman wrote, she had ended an abusive two-year relationship with a borderline alcoholic that had destroyed her self-respect and forced her into debt and foreclosure. “I felt foolish,” she said, “and most of all, I felt like a failure. Then I read your book.

  “Now I’m happy to say,” she continued later, “that I’m starting back to school on Monday. I am focusing on putting the pieces of my life back together. It didn’t happen because of your book, but your book gave me strength, it made me resolute. Most of all, it reminded me that I was not done.

  “So thank you, Vicki, and thank you, Dewey. . . . I don’t believe in angels, but Dewey comes close. Even in death, he has touched lives such as my own through you. You were truly blessed to have such a special person in your life, but I don’t have to tell you that. I just know I have been blessed to have Dewey in my life, even if I never met him in person.”

  Did I react when I read that letter? Of course. To touch someone so deeply, and to help them see the promise in their life, is a gift I will forever cherish. It makes me proud. And that gift was given to me by Dewey.

  Since the publication of the book, I have heard not only from strangers. Old friends and family members who had been lost from my life have reached out to me, too. I’ve met people, such as my cowriter, editors, and agent, who have become true friends. (The illustrator of Dewey’s children’s books was even named Steven James: the same as my beloved brother who died of cancer at twenty-three—Dewey’s Magic again!) I even heard from my ex-husband again. He was a sweet, intelligent man, but he was also a severe alcoholic who did more damage to my life—and his own—than anyone I have ever met. Although we shared a daughter, I hadn’t heard from him in eleven years, until he wrote me a letter after reading the book. He had been sober for a decade. He had married his first childhood sweetheart, and they were living happily in Arizona. He sent me pictures. He looked good. He was always a good-looking man. He looked happy, and so did his wife. He sent me a T-shirt that read “Be careful, or I’ll put you in my novel,” another one of his jokes. There were no hard feelings about the book; it had all been true. “I’m sorry,” he told me simply. And he ended the letter: “I’m proud of you.” I was very proud of him, too.

  I have also heard from fellow librarians, from fellow farm kids and native Iowans, from other single mothers and people whose loved ones committed suicide (it was a brother, in my case) and fellow breast cancer survivors. I have heard from women who shared my terrible experience of an unnecessary hysterectomy in the 1970s, including a woman in Fort Dodge, Iowa, whose surgery was performed by the same doctor as mine, at around the same time. “The surgery almost killed me,” she told me at a book signing. “I was in a coma for a week. My health, like yours, has never been the same.” We hugged each other. She cried. Sometimes, I’ve realized, it’s nice to know you’re not alone.

  Community, we call that. Community. I believe, very strongly, in the power of community, whether it is a physical town, a shared religion, or a love of cats. I believe Dewey is a book about regular people that shows what’s good and possible in ordinary lives, and that this is one of the reasons it has touched so many hearts. People appreciate Spencer, Iowa. They like our cornfields and architecture, and they also like what we represent: simplicity, old-fashioned hard work, but also creativity, commitment, and love. (The doctor who helped with my double mastectomy, Dr. Kohlgraf, told me he was able to finally woo a top surgeon from California to join his practice after twenty years of trying. She had read the book and loved it. She wanted to live in a place like Spencer.) The honesty and the values expressed in the book—“Find your place. Be happy with what you have. Treat everyone well. Live a good life. It isn’t about material things; it’s about love. And you can never anticipate love.”—transcend boundaries. I’m talking international boundaries, too. Dewey’s story has been a bestseller in England, Brazil, Portugal, China, and Korea. I’ve been invited for appearances in Turkey. A man from Milan, Italy, came to Spencer just to see the town where Dewey lived. People all over the world have told me they are coming to visit the famous Spencer, Iowa, and more important, they are keeping the book and passing it down to future generations as a family heirloom. Do you think it’s because they care so much about my story? No. Of course not. They want to share the power of love that is woven into the pages.

  They want to experience, in other words, the Magic of a special animal named Dewey Readmore Books, a cat that somehow, from inside the walls of a small Iowa library, managed to touch the world. As I said at the beginning, all of this is for and because of Dewey. There would have been no book without him. As the young woman from Florida wrote, each reader of the book experienced Dewey’s Magic in their own lives, even though they never met him in person.

  So Dewey lives! Even though he has gone, he lives as a memory, a reminder, an example of what’s right in the world. Most importantly, I realized as I read letters day after day, he lives in all the other animals that share his tenderness, playfulness, attentiveness, and devotion. My favorite fact from the letters was that 30 percent came from male fans, including two cat-loving sheriffs, and they all started “I’m sure you never receive any letters from men. ...” Don’t worry, real men love cats, too! But the most important thing I read over and over again was this: Dewey touched my heart, because he reminded me of my own pet.

  Slowly, it dawned on me that Dewey had tapped into the deep love people around the world feel for their animals. And that Dewey, the book, had given these people something just as important: a way to share that love. In a way, I think, the book made it acceptable to tell a stranger, even if that stranger was only me: “I love my cats. They are important. They are my friends. They’ve changed my life. When they die, I miss them terribly.” As a young man wrote, after telling me of how broken he felt after a difficult divorce and how his two cats had been the only bright spot in an otherwise dismal time:At first I thought to myself, my God, how can I love two animals so much? There must be something wrong with me. My life must be so empty. I was embarrassed to admit to myself how important these cats were in my life. Then I read your book and realized there was nothing wrong with loving an animal to the depths that I do. In a way, your book made it okay for me to love my cats the way I do and it made it okay for me to explore our love further, to deepen our relationship and intertwine our lives even more.

  Thank you.

  For so long, the word people conjured when they heard about a deep relationship between a cat and a person was: sad. But I was passionate about my cat. And I wasn’t the only one. Not even close. I think Dewey, through his generosity of spirit and endearing personality—through the Magic of his life in a small-town library—became a symbol of that vital connection so many human beings feel with the a
nimals in their lives.

  In Dewey’s Nine Lives, you will read nine stories of extraordinary cats and the people who loved them. Three of the chapters are set in or around Spencer, Iowa, and feature Dewey stories that didn’t make it into the first book—because I didn’t know of them at the time. The other six stories are about people who wrote to me after reading Dewey. They are the purest of contributors: fans who wrote only to express their admiration and love for Dewey and their own animals, expecting nothing in return.

  Are these the best stories that could have come out of those three thousand letters? I don’t know. In most cases, after all, I was reacting to a sentence or two.

  “We housed homeless and abused cats on a foster home basis. ...”

  “He survived a coyote attack, a smack by a bear, walking thirty miles to return to me after a vindictive woman took him to another place just to hurt me.”

  “I have never been loved by anyone, not even my daughter or my parents, the way I have been loved by my Cookie.”

  When my cowriter and I followed up on the letters with phone calls, we heard stories about people and cats that were completely unexpected. Some were better. Some worse. All were genuine, heartfelt stories about real people and their animals. After Dewey, people advised me to write about the cat found in a sofa donated to the Goodwill, or the burned cat they saw on the local news, or the one-eyed, lop-eared cat that lived his whole life in a Chicago beer bar. But I thought: Why? What’s the connection with Dewey? Those are cute stories, but where is the love? If I’m going to tell other stories, I want them to be based on the same foundation as Dewey: the special bond between a cat and a person. I wanted to write stories about people whose lives had been changed by their love for their cat.

  The people in this book don’t think of themselves as heroes. They didn’t do anything, as I like to say, that would get them on the Today show or the morning news. They are ordinary people, leading ordinary lives, with ordinary animals. I can’t tell you if theirs are the best stories in those letters, but I can assure you of this: I like every person in this book. They are the kind of people I grew up with in Spencer, and they are the kind of people I want as my friends. Together with their cats, they embody everything I believe Dewey stood for: kindness, perseverance, morality, hard work, and the strength to always, no matter what the circumstances, stay true to your values and yourself. If the resonance of Dewey’s story was based in part on its values, then I wanted these people to reflect those values, too. And I think they do. I am proud to have gotten to know every one of them.

  I can’t tell you that you will like every action taken by the people in this book. You will not, because I don’t agree with some of them myself. As hard as I try, for instance, I cannot condone the fact that Mary Nan Evans didn’t have her cats spayed sooner. I just can’t. Others let their cats roam outside, even though it is well known that this shortens their life expectancy. Some cats might seem too pampered, or smothered, or anthropomorphized. I know there will be objections. After all, I received hate mail after my first book because I let Dewey eat Arby’s Roast Beef sandwiches in his last year of life. I loved that cat with all my heart; I gave everything I could to him; he lived nineteen wonderful years—nineteen!—and yet people still harassed me and called me a murderer because, at the end of his life, in an act of mercy that tore the heart right out of my chest, I put him to sleep.

  If you feel the temptation to criticize, please stop and think of this: Every person in this book loved their animals, fiercely and deeply. Every one of them acted in the best interest, as they understood it, of the animals they loved. If they made decisions you disagree with, that is not an indictment of their character. They are simply different from you. Or they lived in a different time, with a different understanding of how animals and people thrive together. Or, very often, both. No story has been changed for this book. Nothing has been glossed over. This is not The Cat Whisperer or a guide to kitten care. This is a collection of stories about the way real cats and real people live.

  This book is not Dewey: The Sequel, nor is it meant to be. There is only one Dewey (the book), just as there is only one Dewey (my amazing cat). But there are thousands of stories. There are millions of cats that could, if given the chance, change a life. They are out there, living with the people featured in this book and millions of others like them. They are also out there in much worse circumstances: in rescue shelters, in feral cat colonies, or fighting for survival alone on the frozen streets, waiting for their chance.

  Of all the lessons I’ve learned over the past twenty years, perhaps the most important is this: Angels come in all forms. Love can arrive from anywhere. One special animal can change your life. He can change a town. In a small way, he can change the world.

  And so can you.

  ONE

  Dewey and Tobi

  “She was a quiet cat. She was gentle and . . . she never wanted to get in any trouble with anybody, she just wanted to live and let live, you know what I mean?”

  For much of the world, my beloved Spencer, Iowa, with a population of about ten thousand, is a small town. The streets, mostly numbered on a square grid that extends twenty-nine blocks north-south (with a river in the middle) and twenty-five blocks east-west, are easy to navigate. The stores, primarily extending along Grand Avenue, our main street, are sufficient without being overwhelming. The one-story library, near the corner of Grand Avenue and Third Street, in the heart of downtown, is intimate and welcoming.

  But size is relative, especially in a place like Iowa, a state with one-sixth the population of Florida but almost twice as many incorporated towns. Many of us here are from even smaller towns than Spencer, like Moneta, the place I consider my hometown even though I grew up on a farm two miles away. Moneta was six blocks. It had five commercial buildings, if you include the bar and the dance hall. At its height, its population was just over two hundred people. That’s fewer people than come through the door of the Spencer Public Library every single day.

  So around here, in Iowa farm country, Spencer is large. It’s the kind of town people drive to, not through. It’s the kind of town where you recognize most of your fellow citizens but don’t necessarily know their names. A town where everyone hears about the closing of a business and has an opinion, but not everyone is directly affected. When a farm goes under in Clay County, where Spencer is located, we might not remember the farmer, but we remember someone like him, and we care and understand. Whether we’re from an old line of blue-collar farmers, or one of the recent Hispanic immigrants who fill many of the rungs of the vast industrial agricultural economy, we share more than a straight-lined, carefully marked plot of earth called Spencer, Iowa. We share an attitude, a work ethic, a worldview, and a future.

  But we don’t all know each other. As the director of the Spencer Public Library, that was always clear to me. I could walk through the library at any moment, on any day, and recognize the regular visitors. I knew many of their names. I had grown up with a lot of them, and often I knew their families, too. I remember, more than a decade ago, a library regular sliding toward oblivion over a series of months. I had known him since high school, and I knew his past. He had been heavily involved in drugs, kicked the habit, but was clearly in trouble again. So I called his brother, an old friend, who drove in from out of state to arrange for care. That is the blessing of a town like Spencer: Connections run deep. Help and friendship are often only a phone call away.

  But the library drew visitors from nine counties—when I retired we had eighteen thousand card-carrying members, almost twice the population of Spencer—so there was no way I could know everyone. One of the many regular visitors I recognized but never knew was a woman named Yvonne Barry. She was fifteen years younger than I, so I hadn’t gone to school with her. She wasn’t from Clay County originally, so I didn’t know her family. The staff would watch the homeless man who came every morning to visit Dewey, because we wanted to make sure he was doing all right, but Yvonne
was always well dressed and groomed, so there never seemed to be a reason to worry. And she was intensely quiet. She never initiated conversation. If you said, “Good morning, Yvonne,” the most you received was a whispered, “Hello.” She liked magazines, and she always checked out books. Beyond that, I knew only one thing about her: She loved Dewey. I could see that in the smile on her face every time he approached her.

  Everyone thought she had a unique relationship with Dewey. I don’t know how many times someone whispered to me, in strictest confidence, “Don’t tell anybody, because they’ll be jealous, but Dewey and I have something special.” I’d smile and nod and wait for someone else to say the exact same thing. Dewey was so generous with his affection, you see, that everyone felt the connection. For them, Dewey was one of a kind. But for Dewey, they were one of three hundred . . . five hundred . . . a thousand regular friends. I thought he couldn’t possibly cherish them all.

  So I assumed Yvonne was another occasional companion. She spent time with Dewey, but they didn’t run to each other. I don’t remember Dewey waiting for her. But somehow, in the course of Yvonne’s visit, they always seemed to end up together, wandering the library on a secret, silent quest, happy as clams.

  It wasn’t until Dewey’s passing that Yvonne started talking. A little. For nineteen years, I had kept up a steady stream of Dewey chats with many of the library regulars. After his death, he seemed like all we could discuss. It wasn’t until the end of the initial rush, though, when the cold slog of February settled over us and the realization that Dewey was gone had dug deep into our bones, that Yvonne approached me, quietly and nervously, and talked about Dewey. She told me how much she had looked forward to seeing him. How much he had understood her. How gentle and brave he was. She told me, more than once, about the day Dewey slept on her lap for an hour, and how special that made her feel.