Three Cats Inside a Pendant

Some days, my little neighborhood print shop feels less like a business and more like a place where stories quietly change hands.

People come in to print passports, graduation certificates, wedding invitations, old photographs, or a simple sheet of paper.

They leave with paper.

Sometimes, they also leave a story behind.

Yesterday, an elegant woman came into the shop carrying three photographs of her black cats.

She asked us to print them small enough to fit inside a pendant—about one by one and a half inches.

It sounded like an ordinary printing job.

It wasn't.

The photographs were tiny, so tiny that every adjustment mattered.We carefully cropped, resized, and balanced the colors, trying to preserve each cat's expression inside such a small space.

Today she came back to pick them up.

She opened the pendant, looked at the tiny photographs, and smiled.

It wasn't the smile of someone checking whether the printing was correct.

It was the smile of someone who had just recovered a small piece of home.

She explained that her husband loves their cats.

Soon he will be traveling to China for work, and he plans to carry the pendant with him.

"Whenever he misses them," she said, "he can simply open it and look."

That sentence stayed with me.

We live in a world where thousands of photos live inside our phones.Everything is backed up in the cloud.Memories have become almost impossible to lose.

And yet...

Someone still chose to carry three tiny printed photographs around their neck.

Perhaps companionship has always needed something physical.

A photograph you can touch.

A small object that quietly reminds you where home is.

As we talked, I mentioned my newest novel, The Flood and the Rescue.

In the story, an ordinary cat eventually becomes Greg—a paper tiger who survives a flood and begins rebuilding an entire paper universe.

She looked at me with surprise.

"Oh... you're the writer!"

Then she smiled again.

"I follow you on TikTok."

For a moment, two different parts of my life quietly met.

The owner of a neighborhood print shop.

The storyteller online.

The novelist.

Until then, they had felt like separate worlds.

Suddenly, they became one.

She asked where she could buy the book.

Unfortunately, it isn't available in my shop yet.

So I told her she could find it on Amazon.

After she left, another thought came to me.

Her three cats had been folded into a tiny pendant.

My fictional cat had been folded into a paper tiger.

Perhaps they were doing the same thing.

Finding another way to stay close to someone we love.

The older I get, the more I appreciate this little print shop.

Not because extraordinary things happen every day.

But because ordinary moments often carry extraordinary tenderness.

Someone prints a graduation certificate.

Someone prints a baby's very first passport photo.

Someone prints a memorial portrait.

Someone prints three tiny cats for a pendant.

I simply print the paper.

Life writes the rest.