When the first letter appeared in my mailbox at WNKU radio, where I do a program at 6-9 Sunday evenings, I was amused. But I read it and chuckled.

The writer signed himself "Pester Flatt." (If you don't know Bluegrass music, Pester's name was an obvious riff on Lester Flatt of Flatt & Scruggs, known best to American audiences for their music on Beverly Hillbillies.)

I assumed the letter came from some traveling band playing a joke. On the second page of the typed letter was a brown ring where Pester had obviously rested his coffee cup. "Sorry about the coffee stain," he always said.

His hook was that he had a Bluegrass band, and that was the reason he wrote me that first time. He wanted me to announce a name change for the band. Their original name, Pester Flatt and the Lefties, had hurt their bookings at VFWs and Knights of Columbus functions, and so they'd adopted a name change to Pester Flatt and the Rarely Paid.

Pester quickly found work playing for organizations like SQUID (the Society Questioning Underlying Intelligent Design), eating at his favorite Waffle House restaurants and living at the E-Z Sleep Motor Court in his hometown of Tepid Springs, Ky.

As weeks went on, he continued to write. He had a snappy letterhead showing a band of left-handed pickers with the name PESTER FLATT and THE RARELY PAID. I learned about their manager, Wesley Fatchance, of Better Bookings By and By who owned the E-Z Sleep where Pester lived. Remarkably, the rooms still had rotary dial phones, and outside his window a neon light animated a little saw that moved back and forth across a picture of a log.

I learned the names of his band members gradually: on banjo, Ford Maddox Ford; Acme Ruehlman on mandolin; Stinky Ashcroft on fiddle; and Little Max played bass and drove the bus. (Little Max has since been busted for taking human growth hormone.)

All that first summer Pester wrote me about the festivals he was playing: He had dates for the Flotsam County Fair, the Boysenberry Festival and his hometown gig at the Woodbine Twineth Retirement Home. He wrote that he had gotten hung up in Eastern Europe on the ever-popular Still Tryin' to Get Down from the Mountain Tour. Another time, he was captured by extra-terrestrials and woke up in a Tod Oldham Barcolounger with little space creatures probing his brain.

He didn't forget his mother on Mother's Day: He had a seat reserved for her at the Waffle House and paid for the whole thing minus tax, tip and service.

One of the best letters Pester ever wrote is now in the possession of the Bill Monroe Foundation, and it contains the inside story of the Shroud of Rosine. Rosine, Ky., was where Monroe was born, of course. In fact, it's true that someone broke into Monroe's house and smashed his legendary Gibson F-5 mandolin.

What we didn't know -- but Pester did -- is that Monroe fashioned a makeshift bag out of a linen handkerchief and took it to Gibson to see if it could be repaired. "Recognizing it as an almost holy relic," Pester wrote, the technician, Charles Derrington, spent four months sorting and gluing 500 tiny splinters of wood back together.

"They say the great man wept," Pester wrote of Monroe when they returned his restored F-5. "What they don't tell you is that Derrington neglected to return the linen handkerchief."

He had cast it aside until one day he was using it as a polishing cloth and observed the faint image of the shattered F-5. Pester wrote that Derrington vanished under mysterious circumstances and the "Shroud of Rosine" (as it has come to be known) has resurfaced only periodically over the years, once in the Lincoln Bedroom during the Clinton administration. Pester and the boys promptly had T-shirts made with the shroud on one side and Mel Gibson on the back.

The truth is, after over a year's worth of letters, I still have no idea who Pester is. I have Googled him of course, with no luck. Wayne has been checking the Country Blogosphere -- ditto.

His letters arrive in my mailbox sometime during the week. At first, Wayne and I handled them with tweezers and plastic bags, hoping we could dust for fingerprints or get DNA off the saliva used to seal the envelope. But the magic of Pester's writing, the wonderful way he illumined our Sunday night world, gradually began to work its magic, and we have come around to thinking that whoever Pester is he has been a gift to us, as good writing always is (and Pester is a very good writer), and it might be best not to ask too many questions.

In Charlotte's Web, E.B. White's book about a writer who happened to be a spider, the barnyard animals looked far and wide for just the right word for Charlotte to spin into her web, and she saved her friend's life at the expense of her own. Sometimes writing is like that: It can transform and transcend, inspire and entertain. Words define us, elevate us. They "fix" us like flies in amber and sometimes tumble out of our mouths with the skill of acrobats.

Join us some Sunday night, why don't you? We're working on an intervention for Little Max (the one who's addicted to human growth hormone).

By the way, if Pester should happen to read this, sorry I don't have a coffee stain -- Kaldi's is closed!