In Goog-gorium (A Remembrance of St. Googey)
That’s right, I’ve decided Googey was a saint. Deal with it. Let’s get the Chicago Pope into the store and make this official.
Googey got a LOT of press over the years, so I’m going through and rounding it up and putting it here to tell the story of Googey, so one day the governor will stumble across this page and realize we need declare Googey Day a state holiday.
Below you will find stories about Googey’s HISTORIC Captain Springfield victory, his HISTORIC grand marshalling of the Christmas parade, as well as video of Googey’s jam-packed funeral, as well as my eulogy for Googey.
Googey was loved by so many in our community, and anyone who had the pleasure of meeting him knows he loved everyone he met right back.
In August 2023, Googey was the first non-human to be elected to the position of Captain Springfield! Read more about Googey TRIUMPH.
That December, Googey was honored to be the Grand Marshal of the Downtown Springfield Christmas Parade, becoming the first ever four-legged grand marshal. Take that, Jim the Wonder Dog!
https://sgfcitizen.org/springfield-culture/weekend/googey-the-cat-will-be-springfield-christmas-parades-first-four-legged-grand-marshal/
Captain Googey stopping by Ozarks First’s Unscripted to run around the studio and talk about upcoming Christmas gift ideas!
Googey’s Memorial at the bookstore. Thank you to KY3 for capturing such a wonderful remembrance of the event!
Below is my eulogy for Googey from the memorial.
Was Googey An Angel: An investigation
Despite having a minster father who regularly performed funerals and being well into middle age, this is only the 3rd funeral I have been to, and they have all come within the same week of January. It’s a solid funeral lineup too. Harvey’s mother in Louisiana, Lisa Marie Presley at Graceland two days later, and now a local celebrity cat, so I don’t know how funeral typically operate and if it’s normal for Axl Rose to perform.
I feel like I’ve explained Googey’s origin story so many times at this point in my life because Googey could not stop getting press coverage. I have no idea how many news stories have been written or filmed about him, but he came to us by chance, not unlike, say, a Bagger Vance or John Coffey, at a time that unbeknownst to me, I needed him most.
Googey had a lot of atypical experiences for an orange tabby. Googey was once verbally attacked by a local radio host. He was once threatened by an unhinged Twitter user. His name was tagged on a downtown wall by unsanctioned enthusiastic fans. He grand marshalled a Christmas parade. He has been tattooed on numerous bodies. He inspired a zine, a short play about his imprisonment and execution, a video store was and is being opened this fall named for him and, ...again can I say, he received DEATH THREATS. Most cats don’t have haters, but as Rico Richie reminds us “If you ain't got no haters, you ain't poppin”, and there is no question that Googey was poppin.
II.
They don’t really sell “cat costumes” because cats don’t tend to put up with nonsense like our numbskull dog friends, so I always had to go to the dog section. I have a photo of Squash in one of those Santa costumes that make it look like he is walking, from before we found Googey, and the disgust shooting out of his eyes in the photo, it could go along a Dictionary definition of “disdain”. But Googey was always quick to please and allowed me to dress him up as a turkey, as a cowboy, as a snowman. We wore matching Eeyore costumes a few consecutive Halloweens.
I have one last costume photo of Googey that I took to use as an advertisement in the program for SCT’s production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (starting February 14!). I ordered Googey a “Doggy Parton” wig and frilly pink dress and a cowboy hat and Sheriff page for Squash Burt Reynolds. Squash still looks like he wants me to fall down the nearest well, but it kind of works for a no-nonsense sheriff (even though watching the play, you will learn that he’s up to ALL KINDS of nonsense!), but he allowed me to take it, and maybe he had the sense that this was going to be his last chance to get in a Googey Classic Costume pic.
It’s easy to project human emotions and thoughts onto cats, and at the risk of sounding like Timothy Treadwell, I know that Googey had the ANGELIC ability to read moods. I’m sure Penn Jillette can give me some scientific explanation, but I’ve had too many people tell me about coming into the store having one of the worst days of their lives and having Googey come over and hop in their lap and providing comfort, and maybe he just learned this skill from providing me so much comfort, but no amount of facts and logic can convince me that he didn’t know what he was doing every time he hopped in a lap. One of the worst parts about being melancholy around the store thinking about Googey is that there is no Googey here to offer comfort.
III.
Towards the of 2019, I announced the store was closing. I never got to give a real explanation for what went wrong because even when enough people rallied to convince me to give the store another try (TWO MONTHS BEFORE COVID), the core issue of what was wrong with the store had still not been solved. I know how to run a bookstore. I’m good at it when I want to be. From when Aubrey moved to sometime in 2020, instead of being good at it, I was drinking the store away. The store ran on fumes for years, whatever goodwill we had remaining from the Aubrey years, and Googey and Squash were forced to pick up the slack. I know the difference between a good bookstore and a bad bookstore, and I was embarrassed by the store for all those years. (This store is still only about 25% as good as I want and am capable of making it).
It may be counterintuitive but it’s actually pretty easy to be drunk all the time when you have no one to be accountable to. It’s not good for your health or the financial bottom line, but it gets you through the day pretty quickly and easily and then you just get to pass out and wake up and start the cycle again. The difficulty comes in when you finally concede that being an increasingly erratic lush isn’t really a way to live. Drinking all day-easy. Stopping drinking all day-hard.
I recommitted to the bookstore at the end of 2019 and decided to be honest with the people in my life about the extent of my problem and began what felt like the long Sisyphean struggle of quitting drinking on my own, which was a couple of years of weeks or months long periods of sobriety followed by 10 or 14 day long binges followed by immediately cutting off drinking again. You can probably imagine that this is not good for one's health, and you aren’t driving to Oklahoma to stock up on classic paperbacks. And even if I had the motivation, I no longer had a car to go buy books.
Part of what would make ending a drinking binge so hard was the knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to stave off going through withdrawals, which, for me, manifested in 3 day periods without sleep, well, you can just google the symptoms, but it was not great. There were many days where the only thing that I would physically leave the bed for was to take care of the cats, and then it was back to immobility for the day. For someone who starts to freak out if I’m getting coffee in the morning and realize I am going to get 20 seconds late to work, I had no problem leaving the store closed for the day to just keep drinking. A Class Action Lawsuit should have been filed against me by customers and former customers for time wasted.
I say all of that to say, that in the darkest periods when I would see hallucinations or when I would have trouble calming my breathing, Googey was always there with me. He would lie on my chest and I would set my breathing to his to remember how to ease myself back to a state of semi-normality when my body could begin the process of returning to normality. Googey gave me a reason to get out of bed, even if only to walk to the kitchen for a few minutes and get us both some water. (I obviously have to credit Harvey and my family and my friends for getting me through, but I could not have gotten to the period where I could accept help without Googey dragging me to the kitchen over and over).
IV.
After a really rough period and being away from us hospitalized, Googey was feeling more like himself on our last night together and was able to eat a little and hoovered down some of those paste treats. I raided the Price Cutter shelves for every possible treat I could think of. Squash must have thought it was his birthday. I tossed a bunch of blankets on the floor and we watched an Eva Marie Saint movie with the tagline “Give me any American for 36 hours and I’ll give you back a traitor” on my laptop and Googey lay on my chest breathing like we had done so many times in good times, but also when I felt I had nothing left in my life that mattered but him and Squash. I was so happy to have one last night with him where the pain was eased and we fell asleep around hour 25, so I still don’t know if any American can be turned into a traitor in 36 hours. Maybe Squash and I will finish it sometime.
At one point, I texted Harvey just to say “SQUASH ISNT UP TO THE TASK. HE DOESNT HAVE THE JUICE”
Something I struggled with a bit in the last week thinking about Googey was how much he added to my life, and because he spent the first half of his life trying to tip toe around a collection of empties next the couch his passed out owner was on, that I had prevented him from having the life he should have, but hearing all of the stories and memories and experience people had with Googey over the years, I was confident that he had an amazing life, and I thank you all for picking up the slack until I was able to.
After Googey passed, my father has assured me that our pets DO go to heaven, and this presents a problem for Squash and I because there is no question that Googey’s pure heart is a first ballot Heaven Hall of Famer, which means that Squash and I with our grouchy demeanors have a lot of work to do, but we will. We have made a pact that for the rest of our lives to look to Googey example of patience and love with us, and we will spend our lives living by his example, so we can one day join him. My first day alone back at work after Googey passed, I needed something to read to focus on something other than Googey’s absence and for some reason instead of grabbing a Jack Reacher novel from the thrillers, I chose Tony Kushner collection “Thinking about the Longstanding Problems of Virtue and Happiness” (not as fun as Jack Reacher throwing toughs through plate-glass windows and pool tables) and in one essay Kushner writes about his indebtedness to friends, writers, and collabotors on his work, how no achievement is a singular act. In the way that if Obama were here, he would look around this bookstore and then look at me and say “Uhhhhh Joshua, uhhhhh, You didn’t build that”. And Obama would be correct, this store would not still exist, my life would not be what it is, without the help of my friends, my family, the community support, and without Googey.
Kushner writes that in reading literary critic Harold Bloom’s translation of the Hebrew meaning for “blessing” he was provided him with the “key to the heart” of his most famous work Angels in America. Blessing, Bloom translated to mean “more life”, and I was going to try to explain here what this evokes in the play, but I can’t explain all that, so just go see it or read it, but reading that on Monday and thinking about the life that Googey provided to me and to all the people who reached out to share their memories and shared the warmth Googey provided to them gave me a comfort that Jack Reacher tossing out handsy patrons at a Key West topless bar would not. For me, Googey was a blessing quite literally. He provided life not just in the literal sense, but in every sense of life being fuller. And I feel so blessed that we all got to share his life together.
To conclude my investigation, I will quote Quiz Cat Donnie Smith from my unproduced all-cat shot for shot reimagining “Magnolia 2” “No, it’s not dangerous to confuse kittens with angels.”