Today a guest show from producer Alexis Hart.

Alexis is a singer-songwriter and composer and filmmaker and now a radio maker.

He's a kind of media renaissance man. He sent me this story and I loved it and now I'm sharing it with you.

Welcome.

This is the story of the ultimate practical joke played by one musician upon another and how I fell for it. You could call it a friendly ghost story,

or a musical tragic comedy.

But whatever you decide to call it,

all I know is that it's a true story.

By November, it was pretty clear that Herschel's cancer was terminal, even if he refused to accept it.

Last time I talked to him on the phone a few weeks before, he told me he was going to kick this damn thing.

But I think he was putting on a brave face for my mother-in-law,

Yared, who had lost her previous husband to cancer only five years earlier.

I think he was trying to live long enough so she wouldn't have to go through that again with him.

Before he got sick Herschel and Yared would visit us a few times a year, and while mother and daughter would disappear after dinner to catch up.

He and I would stay put at the table, a bottle of something to share.

Reveling in the randomness of being attached to the same mother and daughter to and And as his condition worsened, I thought about him often.

But that's it.

He was not in my mind that chilly Sunday afternoon.

I snuck off for what I thought might be the last bike ride of the year before the rains came.

Maybe it's the rhythm of pedaling or the constantly changing scenery,

but I often get song ideas when I ride.

Usually though, it's just a little snippet of a lyric or

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