Going in circles talking about dots

It’s always nice to be reminded of memories. Even if they bring you back to when a seemingly innocent conversation had you going in circles.

Case in point, the day my youngest son and I quibbled over circles and dots.

“What happened to your nose?” I had asked him as he and I were driving to Halifax one weekend years ago. “There’s something on the side of your nose.”

“We were painting at school today,” he said.

So, of course, I asked what they had painted.

“A dot,” he said.

“A dot?” I asked.

He looked at me with that, ‘Are you hard of hearing?’ look.

“Yes,” he said. “A dot.”

I’m not sure why, but I had trouble wrapping my brain about this.

“A dot,” I said. “Like a dot?”

At this point I’m moving my finger back and forth in a pointing motion, as if I were going to be tapping a dot onto a piece of paper.

“Yes,” he said, growing impatient with the flow of the conversation. “A dot.”

“A dot?” I asked again. “Like a little dot?”

“Oh my dear lord, mother,” I heard him mutter under his breath.

Seriously? Did he just ‘Oh my dear lord’ me?

I explained my definition of a dot to him. It’s this small, tiny thing, I said. And since it’s so tiny, it couldn’t have taken very long to paint one.

In response, he then went on to move his hands in a circular motion, showing me the size of the dot they had painted.

“Oh,” I said. “So you painted a circle.”

“No,” he corrected me. “It was a dot.”

Okay, I could see there was no winning this argument.

I moved onto my next line of questioning.

“Why did you paint a dot?”

“Because it was expressive,” he told me, adding, “You really don’t know much about art, do you?”

What I wanted to say was that I know the difference between a dot and a circle, but I kept that to myself.

“So what does any of this have to do with your nose?” I asked.

It’s then that he wiped off what I thought was a scratch, but what was apparently paint from the side of his nose.

He then went on to talk about a painting they had learned about that had three vertical lines and had been sold for $1.8 million.

Ah yes, I told him, the Voice of

Fire.

I remembered the controversy the National Gallery of Ottawa caused when it purchased this painting for its permanent collection in the late 1980s at a cost of $1.8 million.

While my son and I both agreed that was rather excessive, we still agreed to disagree on what constitutes a dot.

That weekend we were sitting in our hotel room. Throughout the evening I had been admiring a piece of artwork on the wall. It was a combination of colourful circles, some overlapping others. For some reason some of the circles reminded me of the lids of paint cans.

Suddenly the painting caught my son’s attention.

“See,” he said. “I told you dots make good art.”

“They’re circles,” I corrected him. “No, they’re not,” he said, again reminding me that I don’t know anything about art.

And – by his definition – I didn’t know anything about dots either.

I could have argued the point with him once again but opted not to.

After all, I figured we had been going around in circles on this long enough.

So, end of story. Period.

Or should I say – End of story, dot.