How do you become an icon?
Do you vault over peasants like potatoes?
Do you leap neighbors like toadstools, excelsior ever upwards?
Or do you curl as small as a shrimp, pink with secret poetry?
Across a braid of spiritual traditions, an icon is a sort of sunbeam. Although it may be a breathtaking image, gold and shimmering, its purpose is to point beyond itself to great light. It is a window, an encouragement, a pinch of spice from the feast.
How do you become an icon?
Across all 77,000 streaming channels, an icon is a person of vinyl and varnish, a Big Name with a big following. Although there is surely a human inside, their person is to point to their own hologram. They are an aspiration, an air bubble, a winner who requires losers to exist.
How do you become an icon?
We use the word rather differently at Tabby’s Place, and we use it often. “She was iconic.” We may be speaking of Rose or Dot. “The ultimate icon.” Anka and Tashi tilt for the title.
Their diseases are chronic, but their light is iconic. Yet not even a cat turns “icon” overnight.
How do you become an icon? No one would have asked Valerie in her early days. Painted in the perfect hue to hide, Brooklyn’s shiest was silent silver. Spangled with overwhelm, our newest paraplegic did not want to be the sun. Still squinting in the light, the lobby’s littlest lived like a new moon.
Timid and retiring, Valerie could not help but reflect the light. Her bashful eyes poured poetry. Her sense of wonder went behind her back and blew trumpets. Her love outran her caution. Her gratitude goosed her and dressed her in ruffled diapers.
How do you become an icon?
Do you curate your kindness, distributing silver dollars to the winning and the worthy? Do you err on the side of elegance, accepting admiration above friendship?
Or do you turn your fearful face to the light and let yourself shine, even if you shake?
Valerie gained weight and grace. Valerie listened carefully, leaning in for words that shimmer and songs that heal. Valerie lost the listlessness of the cool and the careful. Valerie found herself befriended and bewildered.
The cat who hid became the cat who craved. The species who scared her became the sweetwater she lapped. Soon she was jet-skiing. Soon she was center stage. Soon she was comfortable, which made her sporadically uncomfortable.
How do you become an icon?
Do you guard your heart like an artifact? Do you keep clean and keep your distance from all the slobbering, starving souls? Do you offer up a wax-museum version of yourself, with the genuine article safe behind the drawbridge?
Or do you let the ragged and funny folk love you, even if they leave fingerprints, even if you leave the moonscape where you feel safe?
Valerie slipped the chains of fear and learned they were made of construction paper. Brooklyn’s bravest became the lobby’s lilac lioness. Come what may, she would welcome caresses. The drooling and the dizzy and the dotards needed her. We needed her to need us.
How do you become an icon?
Do you stand with your hands on your hips atop the mountain, afire for all to admire? Do you condescend to kittens who need stuffed animals, or wanderers who need maps, or messes who need mercy?
Or do you pull yourself along in the magic and the mire, right with everyone else? Do you declare your love for a plush mollusk, wailing like a waterfall when he is in the laundry? Do you wear your broken pieces in full color? Do you press your grey face to the generous sun, crowded in with all the funny faces you’ve been given to love?
How do you become an icon?
Valerie shines more than she speaks, sunbeam and spice. She is small enough to make room for everyone. She is valiant and multivalent, victory with two working legs. She is smitten with a stuffed shrimp and all the stumbly bumbly humans who hold her. She is life’s lover, poet and prophet in pale stripes.
She is a Tabby’s Place icon, silver cat turned solid gold.