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 by instinct alone. Here was a guy who cooked without a cookbook and gardened without a mower. His pancakes and omelets were as artful as his pottery. And his garden was unlike any other that I had ever seen. He had a knack for letting it grow just a little bit wild, letting flowers, vines and herbs do their thing.

The Good Life

As much could be said of Jonathan’s hospitality. You never knew who you were going to bump into at one of his weekend get-togethers. It was his generous gift to his friends to provide, on a more or less regular basis, the kind of food, music and convivial company that is known, more in myth than reality, as the good life.  But a lovelier reality there never was, at least for me. Those Sunday afternoons will always linger in my mind as some the most relaxing and enjoyable time I’ve yet to spend on this Earth. It was no coincidence that he chose a home situated high above one of the most beautiful valleys in Northern California. To spend an afternoon in such surroundings, segueing from a blues-band jam to a late-afternoon swim, then to dinner and a hot tub was to enjoy life as we seldom do.

Jonathan and I became close friends quickly. A few years after we met, I began dating the woman I would eventually marry. Marilyn and Jonathan were alike in so many ways that I was certain they would hit if off.  I decided that the best way to introduce them was to have her put together a bouquet of flowers for a visit one Saturday afternoon. Jonathan is the only straight guy I know who could have appreciated the love and care that Marilyn put into this task. It was a beautiful way for their friendship to begin, and it allowed them to forge a deep and lasting relationship from the first.

Chicken Wings

Their friendship was cemented in the course of one of Jonathan’s Sunday night barbecues. He was doing chicken legs, breasts and wings on a bed of hot coals, but it was the way he was doing this otherwise mundane task that I thought deserved an audience. For he was in fact doing it the same way I had seen Marilyn do it – that is, by maneuvering the thinnest parts of the chicken so that they were shielded from the most intense coals by meatier chicken parts. Drumsticks became shelves for the sinewy parts of wings, and breasts got jockeyed constantly to avoid charring.  I really wasn’t kidding when I said that Jonathan’s cooking was as artful as his pottery. For him, chicken on the barbie was just art by another name. Of course, he and Marilyn spent the next twenty years comparing notes.

But it is in one crucial area of his life – namely, parenthood -- that Jonathan showed the most care in his choices. Okay, let’s say it:  He was scared stiff of making commitments. But when he finally did choose, it’s clear that he picked a mate whose instincts for child-rearing were at least as good as his own. What better proof of this than Iris and Leon, the most spectacular successes of Jonathan’s life.  They are an absolute delight to be around, and I know whereof I speak, since I have two teenage boys myself who routinely produce their share of undelightful moments. Iris has composure beyond her years and a beauty that radiates from the inside; and Leon, always brimming with positive energy, has the kind of confidence that every father wants for his son.

Serenity

May they both come to possess the serenity that their father found in his garden. And may all of us know that serenity in our own lives. Jonathan, you have left us too early, but not without inspiring in each of us a sense of what it means to live life creatively. We will miss you always, but our lives will never be without you.