Page 90 of An Introvert's Guide to Life and Love
All I can do is sit down and cry. Four hours of work, wasted. And now I’ll have to pull up the planks and who knows how long that will take? Not to mention that I might damage them in the process, which means I would have to reorder them, wasting time and money I don’t have.
I decide to call it quits for the day. I can’t face pulling up the floor I spent all morning laying. I’ll just go back to the condo and spend the rest of the evening with Gramps. Maybe a cold mocktail on the balcony will make me feel better.
But Gramps doesn’t want a mocktail on the balcony. He surprises me by saying that Angela and some of the others are going to a PowerPoint night down in the dining room and he thought we might join them. I can only assume he means that someone is here to teach the senior citizens how to use PowerPoint, to which I ask… why? But I’m encouraged that Gramps is expressing an interest in joining group activities, so I say yes.
The dining room is packed when we arrive. Angela waves us over to her table. She’s already sitting with five others—popular much?—so Gramps and I drag over some nearby empty chairs.
“What’s going on?” I hiss.
“PowerPoint night,” Angela whispers back helpfully. Her eyes are politely fixed on the woman at the front of the room. She’s a stout woman with a halo of grayish-brown curls, pointing a clicker at the projector screen. The screen currently shows a blurry photo of half of the woman’s face, framed by the hood of an electric-blue rain jacket, with a steely-gray gulf behind her.
“This is when we crossed over into the Prince William Sound,” she says, in a slow, long-suffering voice. “It was pretty rainy that day. It rained the whole trip. It was June, so you would have thought—but, well…” She heaves a sigh, then clicks to the next photo, which shows a group of men onstage wearing black suits with what appear to be LED lights all over them. “This was night two’s entertainment. As you can see, it was the same as night one. These singing cowboys again. It was supposed to be a magician, but he was sick, I believe. Not food poisoning, though, I asked, because that happened on a cruise I was on back in 2015, and let me tell you—”
It is taking all of my strength not to laugh. I lean over to Gramps and Angela. “I thought this was going to be a lesson of some kind?”
“Lesson?” Gramps asks, his eyes still on the presenter. “What do you mean?”
“It’s presentation night,” Angela says. “We started doing these earlier this year and they’ve been such a hit, we do them monthly now.”
I am fascinated. So not only do these seniors already know how to use PowerPoint, they are PowerPoint fanatics. I wish I had some popcorn.
The Alaskan cruise slideshow continues for another ten minutes, and then after a polite round of applause, the next presenter shuffles to the front. There are a few minutes of general chatter as the staff member sitting at a laptop by the projector opens the correct file.
“Hi, I’m Tabitha,” the presenter says in a voice that crackles like a paper bag. She’s diminutive and white-haired, and the deep wrinkles on her face make me wonder if she’s the oldest resident here.
With no further preamble, she launches into her presentation. The first picture is a grainy close-up of dog poop on the grass.
“Anyone know what this is?” Tabitha scans the audience with rheumy eyes.
A man at the table next to ours raises his hand. “Dog shit.”
“Correct,” Tabitha says with a terse nod. “And—” Before she can continue, another woman calls out, “Donny Egan’s dog’s dog shit.”
“Hey,” comes a plaintive voice from the far corner. A man with a dark mop of hair that I strongly suspect is a toupee looks wounded.
“That is correct,” Tabitha says again. “This is the third time I have seen Donny Egan fail to clean up his dog’s mess. After the second time, I reminded him. He said he ran out of dog bags. Guess he’s still out.” Something about Tabitha’s ancient, brittle voice makes her words extra scathing. She clicks to the next slide.
“Now this, this is when Maggie Barnes took out her dentures at lunch.” It’s a photo of a woman sitting at a dining table with a glassof water beside her, inside which I can barely make out the shape of dentures.
“Oh, really,” comes an exasperated whisper from Maggie herself.
“I told her it’s unseemly, but she didn’t listen.”
“I didn’t evenhearyou,” Maggie calls out.
“Lost my appetite,” Tabitha continues, glaring at the picture on the screen.
The crowd begins to mutter and laugh behind their hands. Tabitha goes on to berate Patrick Zhang for taking an overlarge helping of mashed potatoes, Ken Teeson for taking a phone call during movie night, and, finally, Angela for laughing too loudly during last month’s PowerPoint night.
“Pfft.” Angela rolls her eyes and whispers, “Now, Tabitha.”
To wrap up, Tabitha simply says, “Thank you for your time,” and hands the clicker to the next person.
The final presentation is a soft-spoken gentleman’s thorough explanation of why he believes there are alien civilizations living at the bottom of our oceans.
After a thunderous round of applause, including some wolf whistles, everyone stands and stretches and breaks into conversation.
“That was… wow,” I say.
