To: Sandy,
Judy and Gabe
I feel
very fortunate to have known Jascha D. He was very special and I can't
think of one single person who didn't love him. He made me laugh every
day at the office, either in person or on the phone when he called. You
just couldn't be in a bad mood when he was around - it was impossible.
It was like the sun came out the second he walked in with that beautiful
smile of his.
I loved
doing his dictation - he always started out his tapes with one single
word or two, something that we had been talking about, usually food,
like "porcini mushrooms" or "strip steak", then
there would be a second or two of silence and he would say "Okay
Bonnie . . ." and continue on with what he needed to dictate on a
file. He always had a million comma's in his letters. I called him the
"comma king". He would go over the mail with Sandy and have a
pile of filing and he would always tell me "I'll do this filing,
I'm not going to give it to you." Well, the filing just kept piling
up and we decided we were going to have a "filing party" and I
was going to help him get it done. As he added more to his pile, he
would say to me "I'm going to schedule that filing party real soon,
real soon. It will be fun." We never did get to schedule it
and one day, a few weeks ago, I went in his office and filed that whole
huge pile of filing for him and it wasn't fun because he wasn't there.
Sometimes when I walk past his office I have to back up and look at his
desk a second time because I thought I saw him sitting there.
He
called me "silly Bonnie" all the time and even made up this
crazy little song about "silly Bonnie" that he would sing back
in his office. We always talked about restaurants and cooking and wine.
If I told him about something I had at a restaurant that was really
good, he would say "I have a recipe for that" and the next day
a cookbook would be on my desk with the page marked that the recipe was
on. He would say to me "you can go ahead and copy that recipe and
you can go through the whole book and copy anything you think you would
like, but you can't take the book home" and we would both laugh.
One day we were talking about football and he told me that he loved to
go to sports bars because they had so many televisions with different
games on . . . he said he wished his head could spin around like an owl
so he could watch all the games and never have to physically turn his
body around. Who else would have come up with something like that?
If he was going to meet a female at lunch or after work, he would come
to me and say "does my face look greasy?" and we would both
laugh, he would take a tissue and wipe his face off and away he would
go. That became a joke and whenever a female would call for him, I would
say to him "wipe the grease off your face, there's a female on the
phone for you". He knew I liked apples and would cut out articles
or recipes for me about apples. He knew I liked E-Bay on the internet
and cut out an article for me about auctions on the internet, then every
five minutes after he gave it to me, asked me if I had read it yet. We
have "bagel day" every Thursday in the office, which used to
consist of bagels, butter and cream cheese. When Jascha D. started
working with us, "bagel day" turned into "gourmet bagel
day", now consisting of bagels, cream cheese, butter, two flavors
of hummus, sliced tomatoes and sliced cucumbers. He constantly
teased me about my having dinner at Lino's restaurant. He would say
"You and Brent eat there every night" or "What did you
and Brent have for dinner at Lino's last night?" He wanted to have
dinner there so he asked me to get him a menu so he could "study
it" before he actually ever went. When I got the menu for him, he
studied it and told me what I should be getting when I went. I wish he
could have gone there for dinner with us. Brent and I toast him
every time we eat there.
There
isn't a day that goes by that I don't think about Jascha D. I asked
Brent, one of the many times when I was feeling really sad about Jascha
D., why this had to happen and Brent said "I don't have an answer
for you, the only thing I can imagine is that God needed another
angel." I'm not a very religious person, but I think he must be
right.
Jascha
D. - My special friend, I love you and will miss you forever.
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