So the other day I was avoiding productivity around the house when I heard my stepdaughter Melon Ball (not her real name) calling from another room. “Hey, Bob,” she shouted, “come look at what I did.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. “Come look at what I did” can be interpreted so many ways, few of them good. Melon Ball’s 12, so I don’t have to worry that “what I did” was to decorate the walls with finger paint or use my laptop bag as a creative toilet, but I do have to worry about her, say, infecting the computer with a virus known for opening portals to the fiery pits of hell.

I walked slowly toward the source of Melon Ball’s voice. Bad news doesn’t officially become bad news until you actually hear it, so I figured there was no big rush.

I found Melon Ball seated in front of the computer, with my daughter Gustavo (not her real name) looking over her shoulder. A quick glance confirmed that they were neither playing tic-tac-toe with a wargaming government mainframe nor disrupting the space-time continuum. Off to a good start.

“Watch this,” Melon Ball said. “I made it for Mommy.” I saw that she was noodling around in PowerPoint.

Really? PowerPoint? I use PowerPoint at work. Seeing Melon Ball and Gustavo fiddling around with PowerPoint was like catching them making coffee in the kitchen and complaining about the government. I was momentarily less certain about the space-time continuum still being intact.

“It’s really cool, Daddy,” Gustavo said.

“OK,” I said warily. “Let’s see it.”

Melon Ball hit play and let her slideshow rip. I immediately noticed her presentation was set to music. I don’t know how to add music to a slideshow. The kids weren’t just making coffee; they were fixing the freaking copier. I made a mental note to start paying closer attention to the children.

The title slide popped up. It read Frisco U Will Be Missed Dearly. Frisco was the beloved family cat that we’d had to put to sleep just a few months ago. He started as Colette’s cat 15 years ago, and she still gets emotional when she thinks about him, so she tries not to think about him too much these days. It’s a little bit of a touchy subject.

And Melon Ball had apparently created an entire PowerPoint presentation about him.

Oh, but it gets better. The second slide said R.I.P. and had a picture of Frisco in the middle. I realized it wasn’t just any picture; it was one of the pictures we took the night before the old man’s final trip to the vet. That had been a very sad night in our house. Colette and the girls had cried a lot. I mean, a lot. The girls had insisted on having pictures taken with Frisco, despite the fact that they were clearly sobbing their heads off in each one. We kept the pictures because the kids wanted them for whatever reason, but Colette and I go out of our way not to look at those photos. We prefer to remember Frisco as the quirky, fat, charmingly stupid cat he was in his prime. In the pictures from his last night, he’s…well, he’s just not at his best. I’m kind of a cynical heartless curmudgeon and even I don’t like looking at those shots of the old boy.

And there Frisco was, looking terrible, next to the letters R.I.P. Not only that, but the next five slides were nothing but full-frame photos from that night. Sickly cat and sobbing children abounded. It was like making a tribute to your late grandma and starting with the pictures of her in her hospital bed.

I stared, slack-jawed, at the monitor. “And you made this for Mommy?”

“Yeah,” Melon Ball said. “I made it because she misses Frisco so much. I showed it to her once, but she said it made her too sad, so I added more happy pictures at the end.”

“Oh.” Really, I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

Sure enough, after the first five or six pictures, the slideshow shifted away from the creepy “last supper” shots and onto cheerier shots of Frisco playing with toys or wrestling with the other cats or whatever. OK, this is better, I thought.

Then we got to the final slide. It read, "WE MISS YOU!! We can’t wait to see you some day again. Wish you were here to refill our empty HEARTS!!"

To refill our empty hearts. Yeah, that’s going to cheer Mommy right up. It will cheer her so much she’ll run straight out to the nearest liquor store. I tried to think of a way to diplomatically suggest a few edits, but before I could say anything, I heard the back door open. It was Colette returning from an errand.

Yikes.

Melon Ball whirled around. “Mommy, come here! My slideshow’s all done now! Come look!”

Colette’s voice from the other room sounded stricken. “Oh, Melon Ball, I don’t want to watch that again. I’m proud of you for making it, but—“

Melon Ball cut her off. “Yeah, but I added more pictures so it won’t make you cry again. Come look.”

“Did you take out the sad ones?”

Pause. “I added more pictures,” she said. The kid has a future in politics. “Come look.”

And at that point, Colette was hosed. Melon Ball was so proud of her presentation – which I later learned took her hours to put together – that Colette had no choice. She shot me a look as she came into the room. All I could do was shrug and wince in return. I put my arm around her and resolved to run out to the store for a bottle of wine after the kids were in bed.

And so we watched, all of us gathered around the computer as the peacefully resting ghost of Frisco attempted to fill our empty hearts once more. I have to say, I was impressed with Colette’s ability to hold it together and smile for Melon Ball afterward. She even gave the kid a big hug. Fortunately, Melon Ball didn’t notice how quickly Colette left the room, or that she took longer than usual to come out of her room.

Melon Ball turned to me. “So did you like it, Bob? It makes me really miss Frisco.”

“Yeah,” Gustavo said. “It makes me really miss him, too. He was such a good fatboy.”

“You did a good job, Melon Ball,” I said. “Really good.”

What I didn’t say was, I need to go redo my will and add in a new addendum: at my funeral there will be no commemorative PowerPoint.

Bob Rybarczyk (brybarczyk@sbcglobal.net) writes stuff. He once thought he had the eye of the tiger, but it turned out to only be pink eye. Look for his novel, “Acoustic Kitty,” at area Borders stores and online at Amazon.com. And coming soon: “The Cat Ate My Nachos: The Very Best of Suburban Fringe.”