Vermont Public Radio began a new tradition last year, and it’s rapidly replaced St. Patrick’s Day as our favorite minor holiday of the year — the VPR Commentator Brunch. It’s held down in Killington, according to the classic formula: good food, good people, good fun.

VDB and fellow commentator/blogger Caleb Daniloff. High-tech photo by Mark Vogelzang.

Of course, you sing for your supper. This year the assignment was this: a commentary of about a minute in length. A prose haiku, on the topic of “Common Ground.”

Of course, we couldn’t help but take that slightly ironically, and stretch the time-frame just a bit. The piece follows. Many thanks to the staff at VPR. Brilliantly done.

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Hummels 4 BigTime

If you’ve ever collected rare Hummel porcelein figurines, you know that over time they become as dear to you as your own children. And when you find that you have to sell one of your children over the internet — well, it eats you up inside.

But with the price of gas hovering around 18$ a gallon, my wife and I finally had to bite the bullet and auction off the most precious Hummel in our collection: a 32-inch version of the “The Happy Wanderer” with almost no crazing in the glaze.

It was worth every penny of $29,000, but we needed cash fast, so we put it on Ebay for 20. And got a bite that same afternoon: a guy based in D.C. who called himself “Hummels 4 BigTime.”

Now, as we got chatting over email during the sale, it turns out that the guy is Dick Cheney, and he’s as serious about Hummels as it’s humanly possible to be. Really, he already has a mint condition jumbo-sized “Happy Wanderer,” but he’s buying up all the others to try to increase its value.

In fact, when he receives ours in the mail, he plans to take it out into his garage at the Vice Presidential residence, put it in a Hefty bag, and bust it into a million pieces with a hammer.

Which isn’t exactly the fate you’d wish for one of your children — even one you’ve just sold over the internet — but even so, I can’t begin to describe how nice Dick was about the whole deal.

My wife and I came away from it full of hope somehow, hope that maybe the Internet was the key to bringing this crazy world of ours together again. Not a red state, or a blue state, but a virtual state, where we Americans can all of us find our virtue again, somehow.