Good Day Jefferson Hour podcast listeners. Thank you for listening.

Let me say something really important.

You know, I do these winter encampments and these cultural tours and so on, a good friend of ours. His name is Mark from Ashkosh, Wisconsin, has come

to a number of them, a wonderful, modest, thoughtful man, a reader, somebody that has really

added considerably to my joys in life. Unfortunately, he died on February 21st, and it came as a Unfortunately he

and 20 of us were at Locksaw Lodge west of Missoula just a few weeks ago

and Mark is an extraordinary contributor to our

conversations. He's he's he's he never speaks when he doesn't have something to

say you know it's it's it's it's really He never speaks when he doesn't have something to say.

It really came as a shock to hear of his death.

And I just want to reach out to all of the people who knew him and his family

and just say how sorry we are.

Death is something that we all encounter one way or another

throughout our lives.

It always comes as a shock when you see somebody and then a week later you hear that they've died.

This happened to my mother last summer. Your father died this fall. It's a, even when you

expect it, it's shocking to hear it and nobody expected that Mark was going to die.

Yeah, but you know what for all the things us humans can do,

understanding death, it's just not one of them.

No, and I've been working on a lot of things regarding Shakespeare.

I just gave a performance in my sort of one-man Shakespeare program at Bemidji, Minnesota with the symphony a week or so ago,

our mutual friend Dr.

...