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

Chapter 24

Dewey’s Diet

Dad says Max II, his beloved Himalayan, will outlive him. He finds comfort in that certainty. But for most of us, living with an animal means understanding we will experience our pet’s death. Animals are not children; rarely do they outlive us.

I had been mentally preparing for Dewey’s death since he was fourteen years old. His colon condition and public living arrangement, according to Dr. Esterly, made it unlikely Dewey would live longer than a dozen years. But Dewey had a rare combination of genetics and attitude. By the time Dewey was seventeen, I had nearly stopped thinking about his death. I accepted it not so much as inevitable but as another milestone down the road. Since I didn’t know the location of the marker, or what it would look like when we got there, why spend time worrying about it? That is to say, I enjoyed our days together, and during our evenings apart I looked no further than the next morning.

I realized Dewey was losing his hearing when he stopped responding to the word bath. For years, that word had sent him into a scamper. The staff would be talking, and someone would say, “I had to clean my bathtub last night.”

Bam, Dewey was gone. Every time.

“That isn’t about you, Dewey!”

But he wasn’t listening. Say the word bath—or brush or comb or scissors or doctor or vet—and Dewey disappeared. Especially if Kay or I said the dread word. When I was away on library business or out sick, as I often was with my immune system so compromised by surgeries, Kay took care of Dewey. If he needed something, even comfort or love, and I wasn’t around, he went to Kay. She may have been distant at first, but after all those years she had become his second mother, the one who loved him but wouldn’t tolerate his bad habits. If Kay and I were standing together and even thought the word water, Dewey ran.

Then one day someone said bath and he didn’t run. He still ran when I thought bath, but not at the word. So I started to watch him more closely. Sure enough, he had stopped running away every time a truck rumbled by in the alley behind the library. The sound of the back door opening used to send him sprinting to sniff the incoming boxes; now, he wasn’t moving at all. He wasn’t jumping at sudden loud noises, such as someone setting down a large reference volume too fast, and he wasn’t coming as often when patrons called.

That, however, might not have had much to do with hearing. When you get older, the simple things are suddenly not so simple. A touch of arthritis, discomfort in the muscles. You thin out and stiffen up. In both cats and humans, the skin gets less elastic, which means more flaking and irritation and less ability to heal. These are not small things when your job is, essentially, to be petted all day.

Dewey still greeted everyone at the front door. He still searched out laps, but on his own terms. He had arthritis in his back left hip, and jostling him in the wrong place or picking him up the wrong way would cause him to limp away in pain. More and more in the late morning and afternoon he sat on the circulation desk, where he was protected by staff. He was supremely confident in his beauty and popularity; he knew patrons would come to him. He looked so regal, a lion surveying his kingdom. He even sat like a lion, with his paws crossed in front of him and his back legs tucked underneath, a model of dignity and grace.

The staff started quietly suggesting that patrons be gentle with Dewey, more aware of his comfort. Joy, who spent the most time out front with the patrons, became very protective of him. She often brought her nieces and nephews to see Dewey, even on her days off, so she knew how rough people could be. “These days,” she would tell the patrons, “Dewey prefers a gentle pat on the head.”

Even the elementary school children understood Dewey was an old man now, and they were sensitive to his needs. This was his second generation of Spencer children, the children of the children Dewey had gotten to know as a kitten, so the parents made sure their kids were well behaved. When the children touched him gently, Dewey would lie against their legs or, if they were sitting on the floor, on their laps. But he was more cautious than he used to be, and loud noise or rough petting often drove him away.

“That’s all right, Dewey. Whatever you need.”

After years of trial and error, we had finally found our finicky cat an acceptable cat bed. It was small, with white fake fur sides and an electric warmer in the bottom. We kept it in front of the wall heater outside my office door. Dewey loved nothing more than lounging in his bed, in the safety of the staff area, with the heating pad turned all the way up. In the winter, when the wall heater was on, he got so warm he had to throw himself over the side and roll around on the floor. His fur was so hot you couldn’t even touch it. He would lie on his back for ten minutes with all his legs spread out, venting heat. If a cat could pant, Dewey would have been panting. As soon as he was cool, he climbed back into his bed and started the process all over again.

Heat wasn’t Dewey’s only indulgence. I may have been a sucker for Dewey’s whims, but now our assistant children’s librarian, Donna, was spoiling him even more than I did. If Dewey didn’t eat his food right away, she heated it in the microwave for him. If he still didn’t eat it, she threw it out and opened another can. Donna didn’t trust ordinary flavors. Why should Dewey eat gizzards and toes? Donna drove to Milford, fifteen miles away, because a little store there sold exotic cat food. I remember duck. Dewey was fond of that for a week. She tried lamb, too, but as usual nothing stuck for very long. Donna kept trying new flavor after new flavor and new can after new can. Oh, how she loved that cat.

Despite our best efforts, though, Dewey was thinning down, so at his next checkup Dr. Franck prescribed a series of medicines to fatten him up. That’s right, despite the dire health warnings, Dewey had outlasted his old nemesis, Dr. Esterly, who retired at the end of 2002 and donated his practice to a nonprofit animal advocacy group.

Along with the pills, Dr. Franck gave me a pill shooter which, theoretically, shot the pills far enough down Dewey’s throat that he couldn’t spit them out. But Dewey was smart. He took his pill so calmly I thought, “Good, we made it. That was easy.” That’s when he snuck behind a shelf somewhere and coughed it back up. I found little white pills all over the library.

I didn’t force Dewey’s medicine on him. He was eighteen; if he didn’t want medicine, he didn’t have to take it. Instead, I bought him a container of yogurt and started giving him a lick every day. That opened the floodgates. Kay started giving him bites of cold cuts out of her sandwiches. Joy started sharing her ham sandwich, and pretty soon Dewey was following her to the kitchen whenever he saw her walk through the door with a bag in her hand. One day Sharon left a sandwich unwrapped on her desk. When she came back a minute later, the top slice of bread had been carefully turned over and placed to the side. The bottom slice of bread was sitting exactly where it had been, untouched. But all the meat was gone.

After Thanksgiving of 2005, we discovered Dewey loved turkey, so the staff loaded up on holiday scraps. We tried to freeze them, but he could always tell when the turkey wasn’t fresh. Dewey never lost his keen sense of smell. That’s one reason I scoffed when Sharon offered Dewey a bite of garlic chicken, her favorite microwavable lunch. I told her, “No way Dewey is going to eat garlic.”

He ate every bite. Who was this cat? For eighteen years, Dewey ate nothing but specific brands and flavors of cat food. Now, it seemed, he’d eat anything.

I thought, “If we can fatten Dewey up on human food, why not? Isn’t that better than a pill?”

I bought him braunschweiger, a cold loaf of sliced liver sausage many people around here consider a delicacy. Braunschweiger is about 80 percent pure fat. If anything would fatten Dewey up, it was braunschweiger. He wouldn’t touch it.

What Dewey really wanted, we discovered accidentally, was Arby’s Beef ’n Cheddar sandwiches. He gobbled them down. Inhaled them. He didn’t even chew the beef; he just sucked it in. I don’t know what was in those sandwiches, but once he started on Arby’s Beef ’n Cheddar, Dewey’s digestion improved. His constipation decreased dramatically. He started eating two cans of cat food a day, and because the fast food was so salty, he was slurping down a full dish of water as well. He even started using the litter box on his own.

But Dewey didn’t have a couple owners, he had hundreds, and most of them couldn’t see the improvements. All they saw was the cat they loved getting thinner and thinner. Dewey never hesitated to play up his condition. He would sit on the circulation desk and whenever someone approached to pet him, he would whine. They always fell for it.

“What’s the matter, Dewey?”

He led them to the entrance to the staff area, where they could see his food dish. He’d look forlornly at the food, then back at them, and with his big eyes full of sorrow, drop his head.

“Vicki! Dewey’s hungry!”

“He has a can of food in the bowl.”

“But he doesn’t like it.”

“That’s his second flavor this morning. I threw the first can away an hour ago.”

“But he’s crying. Look at him. He just flopped down on the floor.”

“We can’t just give him cans of food all day.”

“What about something else?”

“He ate an Arby’s sandwich this morning.”

“Look at him. He’s so thin. You guys have to be feed him more.”

“We’re taking good care of him.”

“But he’s so thin. Can’t you give him something for me?”

I could, except Dewey did the same thing yesterday. And the day before that. And the day before that. In fact, you’re the fifth person he’s hit with the starving-cat routine today.

Now, how was I going to tell a patron that? I always gave in, which of course just encouraged more bad behavior. I think Dewey enjoyed the taste of food more when he knew I didn’t want to give it to him. Let’s call it the taste of victory.