Dewey: the Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World Page 8

  “Are you trying to avoid us?” I asked him.

  “No, I love your family. You know that.”

  The family was sitting around Mom’s kitchen table one night, and as usual Wally was nowhere to be found. We ran out of beer, so Mom went to the cabinet where she was keeping extra beer for all the friends and relatives in town. Most of it was gone.

  “What were you thinking, taking Mom’s beer?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  “How do you think I feel? How do you think Jodi feels?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “She’s old enough to know. You just don’t know her.”

  Afraid to ask. Afraid not to ask. “Are you even working?”

  “Of course I am. You see the paychecks, don’t you?”

  Wally’s father had given him part ownership of the family construction business, which meant Wally didn’t get a steady paycheck. I couldn’t tell if the company was between projects or if the whole world was crashing down around us.

  “It’s not just money, Wally.”

  “I know. I’ll spend more time at home.”

  “Quit drinking for one week.”

  “Why?”

  “Wally.”

  “Okay, one week. I’ll quit.”

  But again, neither of us believed it.

  After Mike’s wedding, I finally admitted to myself that Wally had a problem. That he was coming home less and less. That I almost never saw him sober. He wasn’t a mean drunk, but he wasn’t a functioning drunk, either. And yet he ran our lives. He drove our only car. I had to take the bus or ride with a friend to buy groceries. He cashed the paychecks. He paid the bills. Often I was too sick to follow the finances, much less raise a child on my own. I called our house the Blue Coffin because it was painted a hideous shade of blue and shaped like a casket. It started out as a joke—it was actually a fine house in a nice neighborhood—but within two years it felt like the truth. Jodi and I were stuck in that house, being buried alive.

  My family came through for me. They never blamed me. They never lectured me. My parents didn’t have money, but they took Jodi in, two weeks at a time, and raised her like their daughter. Whenever life smothered me, they gave me room to breathe.

  Then there were my friends. If that delivery room doctor ruined my body, another stranger saved my mind. When Jodi was six months old, a woman knocked on my door. She had a daughter about Jodi’s age in a stroller. She said, “I’m Faith Landwer. My husband has been friends with your husband since high school, so let’s have coffee and get to know each other.”

  Thank goodness I agreed.

  Faith got me involved in a newcomer’s club that played cards once a month. I met Trudy over our regular game of Five Hundred, then met Barb, Pauli, Rita, and Idelle. Soon we were having coffee together at Trudy’s house a couple days a week. We were all young mothers, and Trudy’s house was the only one big enough to hold us. We would shove the children into her enormous playroom, sit at the kitchen table, and keep one another sane. I confided in them about Wally, and they didn’t blink. Trudy just came around the table and gave me a hug.

  What did my friends do for me in those years? What didn’t they do for me? When I needed to run an errand, they drove me. When I was sick, they cared for me. When I needed someone to watch Jodi, they picked her up. I don’t know how many times one of them dropped by with a plate of hot food just when I needed it.

  “I just cooked a little extra casserole. Do you want it?”

  And yet it wasn’t my family or my friends who saved my life. Not really. My real motivation, my real reason for picking myself up every morning and struggling on, was my daughter, Jodi. She needed me to be her mother, to teach by example. We didn’t have money, but we had each other. When I was confined to my bed, Jodi and I spent hours talking. When I was physically able, we walked in the park with the real third member of our family. Brandy and Jodi looked up to me; they adored me without question or doubt; they gave me unconditional love, which is the secret power of children and dogs. Every night when I put Jodi to bed, I kissed her, and that touch, that skin on my skin, sustained me.

  “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, too. Good night.”

  A hero of mine, Dr. Charlene Bell, says everyone has a pain thermometer that goes from zero to ten. No one will make a change until they reach ten. Nine won’t do it. At nine, you are still afraid. Only ten will move you, and when you’re there, you’ll know. No one can make that decision for you.

  I saw that firsthand with one of my friends. She was pregnant, and her abusive husband was still beating her every day. We decided we had to get her out of there before it was too late, so we talked her into leaving him. We set her up in a trailer with her kids. Her parents came by every day. She had everything she needed. Two weeks later she went back to her husband. I realized then you can’t make people do what you know is right. They have to come to it on their own. A year later my friend left her husband for good. She didn’t need help from any of us.

  I learned that lesson for myself, too, because a marriage unwraps slowly. Maybe it’s not the slowness but the consistency that crushes you. Every day is a little bit worse, a little less predictable, until finally you’re doing things you never, ever thought you’d do. I was looking for food in the kitchen one night, and I found a checkbook. It was for a secret banking account Wally had set up for himself. I turned on the grill at two in the morning, ripped out the checks one by one, and burned them. Halfway through I thought, “Sane people don’t live like this.”

  But I stayed. I was worn out. I was emotionally drained. My confidence was crippled. I was physically weak from the surgeries. And I was scared. But not scared enough to make a change.

  The last year was the worst. It was so bad, I can’t even remember the details. The whole year was black. Wally had stopped coming home before three in the morning, and since we were sleeping in different rooms, I never saw him. He left the house early every morning, but I didn’t know where he went. He had been pushed out of the family business, and our money situation was drifting from bad to unbearable. Mom and Dad sent me what they could. Then they went to the rest of the family and collected several hundred dollars more. When that ran out, Jodi and I had nothing to eat. We lived on oatmeal, nothing but oatmeal, for two weeks. I finally went to Wally’s mother, who I knew blamed me for her son’s condition.

  “Don’t do it for me,” I said. “Do it for your granddaughter.” She bought one bag of groceries, set it on the kitchen table, and left.

  A few nights later Wally came home. Jodi was asleep. I was in the living room reading One Day at a Time, the bible of Al-Anon, a support group for people affected by alcoholics. I didn’t yell or hit him or anything like that. We both acted as if Wally came home all the time. I hadn’t seen him in a year, and I was surprised how bad he looked. He was thin. He was sickly. He clearly wasn’t eating. I could smell alcohol, and he still had the shakes. He sat down on the other side of the room without a word, this man who used to talk for hours to anyone, and watched me read. Eventually he dozed off, so it surprised me when he said, “What are you smiling about?”

  “Nothing,” I told him, but when he asked I knew. I had reached ten. No fireworks. No final injustice. The moment had slipped in as quiet as a stranger coming home.

  I went to a lawyer the next day and started divorce proceedings. That’s when I discovered we were six months behind on house payments, six months behind on car payments, and $6,000 in debt. Wally had even taken out a home-improvement loan, but of course no work had been done. The Blue Coffin was falling apart.

  Grandma Stephenson—Mom’s mother, who had divorced her own alcoholic husband—gave me the money to save the house. We let the bank repossess the car. It wasn’t worth saving. My dad passed the hat in Hartley and came up with $800 to buy me a 1962 Chevy an old lady didn’t even drive in the rain. I had never driven a car in my life. I took driving lessons for a month and passed my driver
’s test. I was twenty-eight years old.

  The first place I drove that car was to the welfare office. I had a six-year-old daughter, a high school diploma, a medical history that can only be called a disaster, and a pile of debt. I didn’t have a choice. I told them, “I need help, but I’m only going to take it if you let me go to college.”

  Thank goodness, welfare was different in those days. They agreed. I went straight to Mankato State and registered for the upcoming semester. Four years later, in 1981, I graduated summa cum laude, the highest level of honors, with a general studies degree, double majors in psychology and women’s studies, and minors in anthropology and library science. Welfare paid for the whole thing: classes, housing, living expenses. My brothers David and Mike had dropped out without graduating, and so, at the age of thirty-two, I became the first Jipson to earn a diploma from a four-year college. Twelve years later Jodi would become the second.

  Chapter 11

  Hide-and-Seek

  After graduation I found out it takes more than a college degree to become a psychologist. To make ends meet, I took a job as a secretary for my friend Trudy’s husband, Brian. After a week, I told him, “Don’t waste any more money training me. I’m not going to stay.” I hated filing. I hated typing. After thirty-two years, I was tired of taking orders. For most of my adult life I had tried to be the person my guidance counselor predicted I’d be way back at Hartley High School. I had followed the path set out for me and just about every other woman of my generation. I didn’t want to do that anymore.

  My sister, Val, who lived in Spencer, mentioned an opening at the local library. At that moment I had no intention of returning home. Despite my minor in library science, I had never really considered working in a library. But I took the interview, and I loved the people. A week later, I was on my way back to northwest Iowa, the new assistant director of the Spencer Public Library.

  I wasn’t expecting to love the job. Like most people, I thought being a librarian meant stamping due dates in the back of books. But it was so much more. Within months, I was neck-deep in marketing campaigns and graphic design. I started a homebound program, which took books to people unable to visit the library, and developed a major initiative to interest teens in reading. I developed programs for nursing homes and schools; I started answering questions on the radio and speaking to social clubs and community organizations. I was a big-picture person, and I was beginning to see the difference a strong library made in a community. Then I got involved in the business side of running a library—the budgeting and long-range planning—and I was hooked. This was a job, I realized, I could love for the rest of my life.

  In 1987, my friend and boss, Bonnie Pluemer, was promoted to a regional library management position. I spoke confidentially to several members of the library board and told them I wanted to be the new director. Unlike the rest of the applicants, who interviewed at the library, I interviewed secretly at a board member’s house. After all, a small town can turn quickly from nurturing nest to nettle bush when it looks like you’re getting too big for your britches.

  Most of the members of the library board were fond of me but skeptical. They kept asking me, “Are you sure you can handle this job?”

  “I’ve been assistant director for five years, so I know the position better than anyone. I know the staff. I know the community. I know the library’s problems. The last three directors have moved on to regional positions. Do you really want another person who views this job as a stepping-stone?”

  “No, but do you really want the job?”

  “You have no idea how much I want this job.”

  Life is a journey. After all I’d been through, it was inconceivable this wasn’t my next step, or that I wasn’t the best person for the job. I was older than past directors. I had a daughter. I wasn’t going to take an opportunity lightly.

  “This is my place,” I told the board. “There’s nowhere else I want be.”

  The next day they offered me the position.

  I wasn’t qualified. That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. I was smart, experienced, and hardworking, but the job required a master’s degree in library science and I didn’t have one. The board was willing to overlook this fact as long as I started a master’s program within two years. That seemed more than fair, so I accepted the offer.

  Then I found out the nearest American Library Association–accredited master’s program was five hours away in Iowa City. I was a single mother. I had a full-time job. That wasn’t going to work.

  Today you can earn an accredited master’s degree in library science on the Internet. But in 1987 I couldn’t even find a long-distance learning program. And believe me, I looked. Finally, at the urging of my regional administrator, John Houlahan, Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas, took the plunge. The first American Library Association-–accredited long-distance master’s program in the nation met in Sioux City, Iowa, in the fall of 1988. And I was the first student in the door.

  I loved the classes. This wasn’t cataloging and checking out books. This was demographics; psychology; budgeting and business analysis; the methodology of information processing. We learned community relations. We spent twelve grueling weeks on community analysis, which is the art of figuring out what patrons want. On the surface, community analysis is easy. In Spencer, for instance, we didn’t carry books on snow skiing, but we always had the latest information on fishing and boating because the lakes were only twenty minutes away.

  A good librarian, though, digs deeper. What does your community value? Where has it been? How and why has it changed? And most important, where is it going? A good librarian develops a filter in the back of her brain to catch and process information. Farm crisis in full swing? Don’t just stock up on résumé builders and career manuals; purchase books on engine repair and other cost-saving measures. Hospital hiring nurses? Update the medical manuals and partner with the local community college to help them utilize your resources. More women working outside the home? Start a second Story Hour in the evening and concentrate on day-care centers during the day.

  The material was complex, the homework brutal. All the students were working librarians, and there were several other single mothers. This program wasn’t a casual decision; it was a last chance, and we were willing to work for it. In addition to attending class from five thirty on Friday to noon on Sunday—after a two-hour drive to Sioux City, no less—we were researching and writing two papers a week, sometimes more. I didn’t have a typewriter at home, much less a computer, so I would leave work at five, cook dinner for myself and Jodi, then head back to the library and work until midnight or later.

  At the same time I threw myself into the library remodeling. I wanted to complete it by the summer of 1989, and I had months of work to do before we could even begin. I learned space planning, section organization, disability compliance. I chose colors, mapped furniture arrangements, and decided whether there was enough money for new tables and chairs (there wasn’t, so we refurbished the old ones). Jean Hollis Clark and I made exact scale models of the old library and the new library to display on the circulation desk. It wasn’t enough to plan a great remodel; the public had to be enthusiastic and informed. Dewey helped out by sleeping every day inside one of the models.

  Once a design was determined, I moved on to the next step: planning how to move more than 30,000 objects out of the building, then put them all back into their correct places. I found warehouse space. I found moving equipment. I organized and scheduled volunteers. And every plan, every penny, had to be tallied and earmarked and justified to the library board.

  The hours at work and in class were wearing me down, physically and mentally, and the school fees were straining my budget. So I could hardly believe it when the city council started an employee education fund. If city employees went back to school to enhance their job performance, the town would pay for it. Donna Fisher, the city clerk, received a well-deserved degree. When I mentioned my master’s progra
m at a city council meeting, the reception wasn’t as accommodating.

  Cleber Meyer, our new mayor, was sitting opposite me at the end of the table. Cleber was the epitome of a Sister’s Café power broker, a blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth type. He had only an eighth-grade education, but he had a loud voice, broad shoulders, and his finger on the pulse of Spencer. Cleber owned and operated a gas station, Meyer Service Station, but you could tell from his huge rough hands that he grew up on the farms. In fact, he grew up outside Moneta; he and Dad had known each other all their lives. And yes, Cleber was his real name. His brother’s name, if you can believe it, was Cletus.

  For all his bluster, Cleber Meyer was the finest man you will ever meet. He would lend you the shirt off his back (gas stains included), and I don’t believe he had it in him to hurt anyone. He meant well, and he always had the best interest of Spencer at heart. But he was a good ole boy, he was opinionated, and let’s just say he could be gruff. When I mentioned my master’s program, Cleber slammed his fist on the table and thundered, “Who do you think you are? A city employee?”

  David Scott, a local attorney and council member, cornered me a few days later and said he’d go to bat for my expenses. After all, I was a city employee.

  “Don’t bother,” I told him. “It will only hurt the library.” I had no intention of undoing all the goodwill Dewey had begun to foster.

  Instead, I worked harder. More hours on schoolwork: writing, researching, studying. More work on the remodeling project: planning, researching, budgeting. More work running the day-to-day operations of the library. All of which meant, unfortunately, less time with my daughter. One Sunday Val’s phone call caught me just as I was leaving Sioux City.

  “Hi, Vicki. I hate to tell you this, but last night . . .”

  “What happened? Where’s Jodi?”