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

Chapter 22

Dewey Goes to Japan

We received the e-mail from Japan in early 2003. Actually, the e-mail came from Washington, D.C., on behalf of people in Tokyo. Tomoko Kawasumi represented Japanese Public Television, which wanted to film Dewey. The company was making a documentary to introduce some new high- definition technology, and they wanted as wide an audience as possible. They decided first on a documentary about animals, then narrowed the focus to cats. They discovered Dewey through a feature in the Japanese magazine Nekobiyori. Would we mind if a film crew came to Spencer for a day?

That’s funny, we had no idea Dewey had appeared in a Japanese magazine.

A few months later, in May, six people from Tokyo arrived at the Spencer Public Library. They had flown to Des Moines, rented a van, and driven to Spencer. Iowa in May is beautiful. The corn is just below eye level, three or four feet tall, so you can see the fields spreading into the distance. Of course, it’s two hundred miles from Des Moines to Spencer, and that’s all you can see, mile after mile. What were six people from Tokyo thinking after three and a half hours of looking at Iowa corn? We’d have to ask them, because they were probably the only people from Tokyo ever to make that drive.

The crew had one day to film, so they asked me to arrive at the library before seven. It was a miserably rainy morning. The interpreter, the only woman in the group, asked me to open the first set of doors so they could set up their cameras in the lobby. As they were carting equipment, around the corner came Dewey. He was half asleep, stretching his back legs as cats often do when they first wake up. When he saw me, he trotted over and gave me a wave. Oh, it’s you. What are you doing here so early? I wasn’t expecting you for twenty minutes. You could have set your watch by that cat.

Once the crew set up the cameras, the interpreter said, “We’d like him to wave again.”

Oh, brother. I tried to explain, as best I could, that Dewey waved only once, when he saw me first thing in the morning. The director, Mr. Hoshi, wouldn’t hear of it. He was used not only to giving orders but to having them obeyed. He was definitely the man in charge. And right now, he wanted that wave.

So I went back to my car and approached the library again, pretending I hadn’t been in that morning. Dewey just stared at me.

What? You were just here five minutes ago.

I entered the library, turned on the lights, turned off the lights, went back to the car, waited five minutes, and approached the library again. Mr. Hoshi thought this might fool Dewey into thinking it was the next day.

It didn’t.

We tried for an hour to get footage of Dewey waving. Finally I said, “Look, the poor cat has been sitting there this whole time waiting for his food. I have to feed him.” Mr. Hoshi agreed. I scooped Dewey up and rushed to the litter box. The last thing I wanted the Japanese to get on film was flying poop. Dewey relieved himself, then ate a leisurely breakfast. By the time he was finished, the camera crew was set up inside. They had come halfway around the world, and they never got their wave.

But they got everything else. Dewey was almost fifteen years old and he was slowing down, but he hadn’t lost his enthusiasm for strangers. Especially strangers with cameras. He approached each member of the crew and greeted him with a rub on the leg. They were petting him, horsing around, and one cameraman lay down on the floor for a Dewey-eye view. The interpreter politely asked me to put Dewey on a bookshelf. He sat there and let them film. He jumped from shelf to shelf. Then she said, “Have him walk down the shelf between the books and jump off the end.”

I thought, “Wait a second. He’s a cat, not a trained animal in the circus, and that’s a pretty specific request. I hope you didn’t come all this way expecting a show because there’s no way he’s going to walk that shelf, slalom between the display books, and jump off at command.”

I trudged down to the far end of the shelf and called, “Come here, Dewey. Come here.” Dewey walked down the shelf, slalomed between the books, and jumped down to my feet.

For five hours Mr. Hoshi gave orders and Dewey complied. He sat on a computer. He sat on a table. He sat on the floor with his feet crossed and stared into the camera. He rode on his favorite book cart with his feet hanging down through the openings in the metal grill, completely relaxed. No time to dally; move, move, move. A three-year-old girl and her mother agreed to appear in the film, so I put Dewey on the glider chair with them. The girl was nervous, grabbing and pulling at Dewey. Dewey didn’t mind. He sat through the whole five-minute ordeal and never forgot to stare sweetly at the camera.

I had been telling the interpreter all morning that people came from all over the United States to visit Dewey, but I don’t think Mr. Hoshi believed me. Then, just after lunch, in walked a family from New Hampshire. Talk about timing! The family was at a wedding in Des Moines and decided to rent a car and drive up to see Dewey. Need I remind you that’s a three-and-a-half-hour drive?

Mr. Hoshi was all over the visitors. He interviewed them extensively. He took footage of them shooting their own footage of Dewey with their camcorder (probably manufactured in Japan). I taught the girl, who was five or six, the Dewey Carry, and how to gently rock back and forth until he put his head down on her back and closed his eyes. The family stayed an hour; the Japanese crew left soon after. As soon as they were gone, Dewey fell asleep and was out the rest of the day.

We received two copies of the DVD. After sixteen years, I was reluctant to talk about Dewey too much, but this seemed special. I called the newspaper. The electronics store on the corner loaned us a giant projection television, and we packed the library. By this time, Dewey had been on the radio in Canada and New Zealand. He had appeared in newspapers and magazines in dozens of countries. His photograph had been all over the world. But this was different. This was worldwide television!

I had sneaked a peak at the video, so I was a little nervous. The documentary turned out to be an alphabetic trip through the world of cats. There were twenty-six featured cats, one for each letter of the alphabet. Yes, our alphabet, even though the documentary was in Japanese.

I told the audience, “There are a lot of other cats in this documentary. Dewey is near the end, and the whole thing is in Japanese, so let’s take a vote. Should we fast-forward to Dewey’s part or watch the whole thing?”

“Watch the whole thing! Watch the whole thing!”

Ten minutes late the crowd was shouting, “Fast-forward! Fast-forward!” Let’s just say it was extremely boring to watch jump cuts of cats and interviews in Japanese. We stopped for especially cute cats, or every time there was an American on screen—we stopped twice for that reason, but one of the women turned out to be British—but most of the footage was of Japanese people and their pets.

When we hit the letter W, a cry went up around the room, no doubt waking the snoozers. There was our Dewey, along with the words Working Cat in English and Japanese. There I was walking up to the library in the rain, while the announcer said something in Japanese. We understood only three words: “America, Iowa-shun, Spencer.” Another loud cheer. A few seconds later we heard: “Dewey a-Deedamore Booksa.”

And there was Dewey, sitting at the front door (I have to admit, a wave would have been nice), followed by Dewey sitting on a bookshelf, Dewey walking through two bookshelves, Dewey sitting, and sitting, and sitting and being petted by a little boy under a table and . . . sitting. One and a half minutes, and it was over. No little girl with Dewey on her lap. No riding the shoulder. No book cart. No family from New Hampshire. They didn’t even use the shot of Dewey walking on top of the bookshelf, slaloming between the books, and jumping off the end. They came halfway around the world for a minute and a half of sitting.

Silence. Stunned silence.

And then a huge burst of cheering. Our Dewey was an international star. Here was the proof. So what if we didn’t have a clue what the announcer was saying? So what if Dewey’s portion lasted barely longer than a typical commercial break? There was our library. There was our librarian. There was our Dewey. And the announcer definitely said, “America, Iowa-shun, Spencer.”

The town of Spencer has never forgotten that Japanese documentary. Maybe its contents. We have two copies for checkout in the library, but nobody ever watches them. Puss in Books is much more popular. But the fact that a film crew came from Tokyo to Spencer, that’s something we’ll never forget. The local radio station and the newspaper both ran long features, and for months people came into the library to talk about it.

“What was the crew like?”

“What did they do?”

“Where did they go while in town?”

“What else did they film?”

“Can you believe it?”

“Can you believe it?”

“Can you believe it?”

Japanese television put Dewey over the top. Even today, when locals talk about Dewey, the conversation always comes around to, “And those Japanese people came here, to Spencer, to film him.” What more needs to be said?

Spencer residents aren’t the only ones who remember that documentary. After it aired, we received several letters from Japan and forty requests for Dewey postcards. Our library Web site tallies the origin of visitors, and every month since the documentary aired in the summer of 2004 Japan has been the second most popular country of origin, after the United States—more than 150,000 visitors in three years. Somehow, I don’t think they’re interested in checking out books.

But the Japanese invasion wasn’t the only special thing that happened during the summer of 2003, at least for me. The previous year, Scott had proposed to Jodi on Christmas Eve at my parents’ house. She asked me to take charge of the flowers and decorations, since both were hobbies of mine.

But there was something nagging at me. My sister, Val, was Jodi’s maid of honor, and I knew the two of them were discussing dresses. I didn’t have a chance to choose my own wedding dress. A girl in Hartley had called off her wedding at the last minute, and Mom bought her dress for me. I wanted more than anything to help Jodi pick her wedding dress. I wanted the dress to be special. I wanted to be a part of it. I called Jodi and said, “I’ve dreamed all my life of helping you pick out your wedding dress. Val has two daughters of her own. She’ll have her chance.”

“I would love to do this with you, Mom.”

My heart leaped into my throat. I could tell by the quiver in Jodi’s voice that she felt it, too. We are both sentimental fools.

But I’m also practical. “You narrow down the choices,” I told her. “When you find half a dozen you like, I’ll drive there to help you make the final decision.” Jodi could never make up her mind about clothes. She kept most of her garments in their original boxes, because she was always returning them. Jodi lived more than three hours away in Omaha, Nebraska, and I didn’t want to kill myself making that drive every weekend for the next six months.

Jodi shopped for dresses with her friends. Weeks later I drove to Omaha to help her make the final decision. We couldn’t decide. Then we spotted one she’d never tried on. As soon as we saw her in the dress, we knew. Jodi and I stood in the dressing room together and cried.

We went shopping together a few months later, and she chose a beautiful dress for me. Then Jodi called me and said, “I just bought a dress for Grandma.”

“That’s funny,” I told her. “I was in Des Moines on library business, and I bought her one, too.” When we got together, we realized we had bought Mom the same dress on the same day at the same time. We really laughed about that one.

The wedding took place in July at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Milford, Iowa. Jodi planned the wedding from Omaha; I did the legwork. My old friends from Mankato, Trudy, Barb, Faith, and Idelle, came down a few days before the ceremony to help me set up. Jodi and I were perfectionists; we didn’t want a flower out of place. Trudy and Barb were nervous wrecks when we decorated Mom and Dad’s garage for the reception, but they did a beautiful job. When they finished, it didn’t even resemble a garage. The next day we decorated the church, then the restaurant for the rehearsal dinner.

There were thirty-seven guests at the wedding, just family members and close friends. My friends didn’t attend the ceremony; they were in a back room heating butterflies. The butterflies were supposed to be kept on ice, in suspended animation, then warmed up and “awoken” fifteen minutes before being called upon to fly. Faith called herself the BBBBB—the Beautiful Big-Boobed Butterfly Babysitter—but she took her job quite seriously. She was so nervous about the butterflies, the night before the wedding she took them to Trudy’s house in Worthington, Minnesota, an hour away, and kept them beside her bed.

When the guests came out of the wedding, Scott’s parents handed each of them an envelope. My brother Mike, who was standing next to the bride, immediately started squeezing. Jodi gave him a look.

“What?” Mike said. “Is it alive?”

“Well, it was.”

I read the legend of the butterflies, which have no voices. When released, they rise to heaven and whisper our wishes to God.

When the guests opened their envelopes, butterflies of all sizes and colors flew up into a beautiful clear blue sky, a whisper away from God. Most of them disappeared on the wind. Three settled back down on Jodi’s dress. One stayed on her bridal bouquet for more than an hour.

After wedding photos, the guests piled into a bus. While my friends cleaned up, the rest of us rode to West Okoboji for a lake tour on the Queen II, the area’s famous sightseeing boat. Afterward Jodi and Scott decided to ride the Arnold Park Ferris wheel, the same one that had glistened in the night when Mom and Dad were falling in love to the sound of Tommy Dorsey at the Roof Garden so many decades before. As the rest of us watched, the Ferris wheel took Jodi and Scott, along with the ring bearer and the flower girl, up, up, up into that clear blue sky, like butterflies slipping out of their envelopes and taking flight.

The letter Jodi sent after the honeymoon said it all: “Thank you, Mom. It was the perfect wedding.” No eight words could ever make me happier.

If only life were that easy. If only Dewey, Jodi, and the whole Jipson family could be frozen right there, in the summer of 2003. But even as that Ferris wheel rose, even as Dewey became a star in Japan, there was a stain on the picture. Only a few months before, Mom had been diagnosed with leukemia, the latest in a long line of illnesses to try to strike her down. They say cancer, like luck, runs in a family. Unfortunately, cancer runs deep in the Jipson line.