The church in Starry Night is the only building without yellow light emanating from the inside and one of the only places throughout the painting where there is not a hint of yellow. Maybe not too significant until you realize that Van Gogh used the color yellow to represent God. The Church at Auvers is of a beautiful church building but with no doors and the path splits instead of leading to the church building, Vincent Van Gogh painted Eternity’s Gate as a representation of himself sitting in a chair with his head in his hands seeming to be in anguish. He finished painting it three days before he shot himself.

In 1993 a young President Clinton was struggling to define himself in terms of the serious issues facing the country, especially the economy. His opponents gleefully seized on issues left over from the 1992 presidential campaign, like gays in the military, to try to define him first.

Clinton managed to lay that particular issue to rest with a compromise that came to be known as “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” If gay or lesbian members of the armed services did not announce their sexual orientation they would not be involuntarily discharged. Clinton himself said that at least on paper, the military had moved a long way toward “live and let live” but it held on to the idea that it couldn’t acknowledge gays without approving of homosexuality and compromising morale and unit cohesion.

In the time it takes you to read this sentence, two children will starve to death, but it is really unlikely that you will ever know who those children were or why they died. In other news, the world’s press has gathered to observe the incarceration of a man who is accused of having killed a wealthy white teenage girl who was on vacation in the Caribbean. No word yet about when the press is going to gather at the site of the incarceration of the other people in the world who have been recently caught and charged with murder, nor are we ever going to hear about the people they killed.

Norman was a sometimes easy, sometimes hard man to love. It’s the nature of love.

I met Norman about five years ago. He was 58 years old, but looked much older. He shared a house with an older and dying brother. The house sat on a hill a mile off the highway. Getting to their house, required a four-wheel drive vehicle. Besides the steep climb on a less than well maintained road, getting from the highway to the house meant crossing two creeks, one of them twice. I have never seen a more picturesque setting for a home. To be on that hill and look out over the surrounding Kentucky land was to taste a bit of heaven.