My good friend Jonathan Wagner was laid to rest in Lafayette, California, yesterday after a brain hemorrhage ended his life at age 53. Many came to pay their respects, for Jonathan had quite a knack for making friends. Following is my eulogy: I'd like to share with you some recollections of my long friendship with Jonathan. When we first met nearly 30 years ago we were not exactly traveling in the same circles. At the time, in the early 1980s, he was a potter living what I had imagined to be a Bohemian life in Santa Cruz, and I was a floor trader on the Pacific Stock Exchange. We were introduced by a childhood friend of mine who was then renting a room from Jonathan in Santa Cruz. He had told me there was this guy I had to meet who was eager to become a market maker on the stock exchange. This seemed to me like quite a leap, going from a pottery wheel in Santa Cruz to the trading pits of San Francisco. So when Jonathan and I first talked about his plans, I advised him to get his feet wet before taking the plunge. Little did I know that in the space of a year, and with scarcely any help from me or from anyone else, he would be more successful at it than I. But then, I had never before met anyone like Jonathan, whose talents and abilities radiate like bursts of sunlight in so many directions that he undoubtedly could have succeeded at nearly any job, and brilliantly. The more I got to know him, the more I began to sense that his natal chart was not like yours and mine. Yin and yang were in fact so felicitously balanced that he could tackle virtually any creative task guided
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