SUSAN LOESCH
CATS IN THE STACKS

OK, Library Cat Staff. We need to have a meeting!

The staff members have been really bad about disappearing into thin air about the time I am ready to stash one of them in a carrier and head to work. Last week’s work schedule fell totally apart, and the cat on duty was whoever wasn’t hidden well enough.

This is quite a change from when I’d call, “Let’s go to school, Big Footsie,” and he would come running and dive-bomb into the carrier. Alex sometimes made me look for him, but he was usually somewhere in plain sight. My current staff needs to improve!

Tank made it last week on kindergarten story-hour day.

He sat in my lap for most of the story but left before it was over.

I think Barney will get most of the story-hour duties, but Tank is an awesome treat-eater! He gets a little impatient as small hands struggle to open the treats and he has to wait.

Barney has worked really hard lately. He likes walking and sitting on Braille and giving head-butts.

He was on duty when his friends Conall and Caitlin came to visit our school for the first time. They fed him treats and catnip before they looked at books.

Caitlin kept saying “Look at his tail; it is standing up!”

This morning Barney had a cool experience. He went to speech class to serve as a prop for a speech. As Barney sat calmly in his bed, the class was shown how to brush a cat and told why and when cats shed. It’s all in a day’s work for the Barn.

Shadow was just as calm wearing his Cinco de Mayo finery, which my fourth graders brought.

Later in the week, my fifth and sixth graders came in. Shadow was, of course, wearing his infamous blue collar with – yes, the flowers.

“Awww, look at his cute collar,” said Makayla. “It even has flowers on it.”

I started to smile and feel somewhat vindicated in my choice of collars, but that didn’t last. As we were watching a video, Mary was standing close by. Into the room wandered Shadow, comfortably weaving between students and under chairs.

“Hmmm,” I heard Mary say. “Real manly collar you have there, Shadow, flowers and diamonds, too.”

OK; it will be off to PetSmart just as soon as I can. Object: Purchase manly collar for Shadow.

SUSAN LOESCH

CATS IN THE STACKS

End of Course exams and the Jr./Sr. Prom…what a week here! The result was lots of extra kids in the library, lots of attention for the library cats, and me finding my new best friends…the Rugrats!

Barney was here on prom day. The seniors were not really interested in their teachers’ assignments, and who can blame them? Barney got lots of petting from kiddos who had been in elementary school when Footsie first arrived on the scene and had grown up with him.

Mary put Footsie’s pink bandana on Barney. “Thank you for being a real man and wearing pink, she told him! None of the guys here will wear pink.”

I finally dug out some Rugrats videos which had just been donated, had the seniors pull beanbag chairs into the video room and watch.

Ah, peace reigned, at last, and the older kids had a ball doing “little kid stuff!”

On Friday I brought our final applicant for a Library Cat position, Shadow. More than one person remarked that catching a quick glimpse of him, for a second it seemed that Big Footsie was back.

Shadow is about a year old, found as a stray kitten. Feline Rescue and Rehome helped his rescuers take care of him, supplying food, litter and medical care. When they moved where they could not have cats, Shadow became a FuRR kitty.

I had older kids first period, quiet and tired from the prom. We sat at a table with Shadow and he acted as if he’d been here for years, being held, sitting in laps, posing for pictures, and just basically lapping up the attention.

We took his picture smelling Mary’s prom roses.

Then came my younger students!

“He looks like a Shadow.” “He really looks like Big Footsie only more so!” “We need to call him Big Footsie Two, or Big Footsie Returns.” ”He has to be Big Footsie the Second, and Barney is Alex the Second.”

From my fifth grader, Brianna: “He interacts with everyone. He’s perfect. He’s gonna be a camera star!”

Brianna has been in the library a lot this week observing the library cats and how they interact with everyone, information for the class newspaper article she was writing on the cats. She is moving out of state after today, and her whole class was full of energy when they came for Library Skills. So, once again, out came the beanbags and the Rugrats.

“I had never seen the Rugrats before yesterday,” I told them.

“Ms, Loesch, you haven’t SEEN them? You’re weird! But we love you anyway,” said Brianna.

The video held everyone’s interest, and the group was quiet. From now on I think the Rugrats and I are gonna be really tight!

SUSAN LOESCH

CATS IN THE STACKS

It is Lady’s Day here in the library! Library Cat version, that is. Sweet little Hexie is auditioning for a spot on the Library Cat Staff, and by the time she had been here two hours she had nailed it.

It is a good thing I hadn’t planned to bring Barney today. Seems Mr. B. is going to be one to set his own work schedule. Again this morning he was nowhere to be found, choosing to rest, no doubt, after his busy day at work yesterday.

Barney excited everyone by eating treats out of Brianna’s hand. 

This is the first time he has done that, previously preferring to pick them up off the counter.

Eating treats offered by hand earns major Head Library Cat points!

He also let Patrick videotape him, to be included in a You-Tube video about our school. He must have felt like a real celebrity.

There was a crowd watching Brianna take pictures of Patrick filming him!  Such is the life of a star.

To cap the day off he joined our kindergarten class for their story hour.

I put his bed in my lap and read  Three Stories You Can Read to Your Cat, by Sara Swann.

My new definition of grace under fire is a cat who can stay calm in the midst of a storm of  eight little hands touching whiskers, feeling ears, holding tail and petting, all while listening to a story!

We made it through two of the three stories before they had to leave and will save the third for another story hour.

“We want Barney to be here all the time,” someone suggested. From the way he sat there, it seems like he might enjoy that.

This morning Hexie first met some of my older students.  I told them about her eyes.

Hexie has only one eye; her other one had to be removed when she was little and sometimes the place where the eye was gives her problems.

“Awww,” said one of my seniors. She is just like us.”

Her remaining eye is the most beautiful emerald green.

“The problems she has are not serious,” I told them, “They are just…”  I paused, looking for the word.

“Annoying,” said one of the kids. “I understand.”  That is exactly it, and they really do understand.

Hexie made herself at home, wandering the library, jumping up on tables, head-butting new friends.

“You will like it here,” one told her when they met.

She ate some treats, met lots of kids and teachers, and, finally, my fourth graders.

As she passed out head-butts, one of them told her, “You are a nice cat. We are going to be really good friends.”

So now we are close to having a full staff.  A Head Library Cat, Barney, a First Assistant to the Head  Library Cat, Tank, and an Assistant Library Cat, Hexie.

I think we will meet one more candidate, Shadow, a kitty as black as Footsie and as round as Barney and Tank.

He may join the staff, but the other three have definitely been hired!

SUSAN LOESCH
CATS IN THE STACKS

Yeah, it is Friday! The kids and teachers are glad because testing is over, and the library cats are glad because next week the elementary students will be back in the library. They have been missed, but there have been extra secondary kids hanging out here and we’ve enjoyed that.

Both Tank and Barney have gotten lots of attention.

“Ms. Loesch, come HERE!” called Mary. She and Tank were in my office and she had a handful of treats. “Tank won’t eat treats. He can’t be a library cat unless he eats treats.” Not to worry. He does like treats; he just wants to pick them up himself rather than having them offered in a hand.

Barney is less of a treat-eater than Tank; he has to work on that. Our speech teacher brings her youngest students in armed with treats and they expect them to be eaten by a library cat!

Of course there are my fourth graders who recently sampled the treats themselves … but that just wouldn’t be the same.

Both Tank and Barney have modeled the Harley-Davidson cap. Their vote seems to be unanimous; it gets a big paws down.

The cap has gotten the kids talking about next Halloween. With the Harley cap and bandana, all we need to do is find a leather jacket and we will have a biker-cat costume.

Trinity, my junior, who has been my student since kindergarten, was petting Tank. “It is just not the same, is it, Ms. Loesch? When Big Footsie died we already had Alex. He was already a library cat, and we loved him. This time we don’t have anybody.”

She is right. And from now on we won’t go without at least one assistant library cat as well as our “head” cat. It seems that for now Barney will have the “head” job with Tank as his assistant. Barney has gotten the hang of the job a little quicker.

He will roam the library looking for people to hang out with, and he stays on the front desk most of the time … except when he is following someone around. Mary says that he likes to play “follow the leader.” He has also mastered the “sleeping on the desk between the keyboard and monitor” job.

This week he gotten to spend a lot of time with Zee, our Turkish exchange student. We took pictures of them for Zee to have when she goes home.

As she stood with her hand on Barney’s side, her interest in becoming a doctor kicked in.

“He is breathing so fast. Do cats breathe faster than people? What is his normal temperature? How do you know if he is sick? If I ever get a cat, now I will know more about how to take care of it.”

These words make me smile, coming from my student who earlier in the year had never petted a cat and was afraid of them. Alex made her love him, and now Barney and Tank are picking up where he left off.

We still have a couple of candidates for library cat who will be auditioning, but it looks like both Team Barney and Team Tank will be happy; both the guys are on the library cat staff for sure!

SUSAN LOESCH
CATS IN THE STACKS

And then came Barney! Our second candidate for Head Library Cat is in the building.

Barney is a huge orange tabby who was a stray headed to a kill shelter a few months ago. Luckily Feline Rescue and Rehome had a foster home opening and now Barney is auditioning for a new job.

He was nervous at first, until Patrick, Lea and Hope spent a whole period brushing him. That is all it took for him to become comfortable.

“You will like it here,” they told him. “We are all nice.”

Barney  then settled down and is taking to the job really well, even sitting in my lap to watch Jumanji along with the first graders.

By his second day he was sitting in Alex’s bed on the front desk, waiting for the 5th and 6th graders to come.

“Barney?” one student asked. “We might have to find him another name!”

It didn’t take long for Makayla and Brianna to have Barney sandwiched between them in a tight hug. They wanted to know if we can call him Alex the second.

Sure. I’m fine with them calling him anything they want to.

Some of the students had asked me for pictures of Footsie, SnuggleBunny and Alex so they could make posters.

Barney planted himself on the table while some read, some worked on posters, and he got brushed.

I fired questions at the kids while we did a review for their ACTAAP exams which are this week. Wow, maybe they really were listening during all these library skills lessons! They fired correct answers right back at me.

I had gone on a sentimental “field trip” one evening earlier in the week.

I couldn’t get the Harley-Davidson cap, which Alex had tried on at PetSmart, out of my mind. I kept thinking of it as Alex’s cap and wishing I had bought it.

So I walked through the store, taking the same path Alex and I had so happily taken such a short time ago, and ended up in the D-O-G department. There had been only one size small cap that day and it was still there, complete with little orange Alex hairs inside.

We tried it on Barney Friday, and he looked really cool.

Since he is so calm, I put a harness and leash on him, and the Harley cap, and we went outside to join the kids and staff in our annual Health Walk.

What a great job Barney did, posing with the kids and resting calmly over Mr. G’s shoulder – a spot which was a favorite place for Footsie and Alex before him.

And so things change but life goes on.

We are still enjoying the sweet smell of Alex’s flowers here in the library, and I am writing thank-you’s to friends who have made memorial donations to Feline Rescue and Rehome in his honor.

Tank and Barney are on duty now. Whether or not either of them ends up as our Head Library Cat, I am sure that both will be part of the Library Cat staff.

SUSAN LOESCH
CATS IN THE STACKS

Our new oil portrait of Big Footsie continues to bring smiles to us all. One of my 6th graders looked at it for a long time and then said, “It looks like Footsie is looking right at me and sees me doing something wrong and is thinking ‘I’m gonna tell!’” We laughed about that.

Some of my secondary kids walk past the portrait on the front desk and tell Footsie hello.

My 4th graders crowded ’round and talked to Big Footsie and actually petted the painting. Then they wanted to have their picture taken with it.

One of my 3rd graders just hugged the painting to her chest and then she also wanted me to take her picture with it, as did her classmates.

They all like that he is wearing his Harley-Davidson bandana in the portrait, and so do I. Some of the kids still say he was a biker dude!

It is nice, and very touching to me, the way Footsie has stayed on everyone’s mind this year. Almost 7 months have passed since the students returned to school and found out that he had died. He has definitely not been forgotten.

One of my favorite mentions of him is in a poem my 4th graders wrote earlier in the year. They called it “Fourth Graders Rule!”

One of the verses reads, “Scissors, markers, crayons and glue. We all like to do art, too. The bells are ringing in our heads. We are wishing Big Footsie wasn’t dead.”

When their teacher brought it to me she wasn’t sure how I’d react, but I loved it, and it made me laugh.

Trinity is a junior now; she has been my student since kindergarten. She has loved all the Library Cats, and she grew up with Big Footsie.

Looking at his portrait, she talked for a long time about him and his effect on her. She said her Granny commented that she doesn’t pick up her own cat, Miss Kitty, and carry her around and wondered why. Trinity says that is because she “learned on Big Footsie” and he never liked to be picked up and carried. She and Footsie were truly buddies.

As we close in on spring break and then the end of the year, we have a few loose ends to tie up.

We still need to find an Assistant Library Cat for Alex; Big Footsie, after all, had 4 assistants at one point.

And we need to decide if “Footsie’s Favorites,” those Accelerated Reader books that earn students prizes when their quizzes are passed, are going to be renamed.

I think I will throw that question out to my 5th and 6th graders and see what they think. They’ve proven to be very wise this year!

SUSAN LOESCH
CATS IN THE STACKS

On Fridays, I have my fifth- and sixth-graders together.

This morning we had a very serious discussion. I asked a couple of questions and then listened as they talked. Feline Rescue and Rehome has taken a wonderful 6-month-old kitten from a Missouri rescue group where she was facing euthanasia.

Sabrina, aka SnuggleBunny, is a sealpoint Siamese, chubby and playful, never meeting a stranger. Alex is in the market for an assistant library cat or two. Big Footsie always had several assistants, which allowed him to have some vacation time.

SnuggleBunny sounds like she was made for the job – except for one thing. She is positive for the feline leukemia virus. My students are familiar with that. Several of Big Footsie’s assistants over the years were positive, including Daisy, Valley and Bill Murray. For a kitten born feline leukemia positive, the lifespan will be short, often only 1-3 years.

How would my students feel about that, after losing Big Footsie so recently? We settled down on the beanbags and they told me how they felt.

“Since she was going to die if she stayed in Missouri I think she should stay here and be happy with us,” said Makayla.

Markissha’s feeling was that “I don’t like to see lots of cats die, but I think we should give her a happy life.”

Mary, my secondary work-study student, suggested that we “just love her to death while we have her.”

Each student got a chance to express an opinion.

Several thought that it would be better to bring her only when the older students are here. I agree with that.

Many of my secondary students met SnuggleBunny in the hall before school this morning. She was comfortable with the crowd and even the bells that rang. To a person, their reaction was positive. “Keep bringing her,” more than one told me, as did the teachers who were also crowded around.

I will give everyone time to think about this and to let me know if they change their mind or if they think having SnuggleBunny around will make them too sad.

One of my 5th graders expressed what seems to be the majority opinion. “You should keep bringing her, and we can make her happy and give her as good a life as Big Footsie and Alex.”

Alex just may have his first assistant!