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August 25, 2003 at 7:51 pm

Morris Agalzoff...

Uncle Morris was that one relative that none of us kids ever wanted to get stuck next to at family functions. He was a stoic first-generation Russian immigrant; my grandmother’s younger brother. It’s not that he was a bad guy or that he wasn’t actually fun to sit next to (if you had never sat before him before), you see, Uncle Morris was a storyteller. He knew every name in our family, every going-on and already-been-done. And he loved his craft. He would sit for hours telling story after story of how he watched our parents grow up or how the Russian Molokan church did this or that. Because of this (and after years of hearing the same stories over and over again), us kids (and now, adults) would always try our hardest to pick a table far away from where he parked himself for the day.

One of our favorite “Uncle Morris stories” was about my dad (though my dad will always adamantly dispute it), after his first day in the third grade.

When my dad came home, he was very sad. He explained how a girl at school had punched him and how afterwards, everyone in class kept telling him, “You have a grillfriend! You have a grillfriend!” Yes, “grill” friend. Uncle Morris, thought it was the funniest thing that my dad was saying “grillfriend” instead of “girlfriend.”

I think I’ve heard this story 436 times since I was in the third grade.

Uncle Morris was a good man, though. He was extremely sensitive (to a fault) and devoutly connected to the Molokan community in Montebello, California. He was always willing to help out his friends and family and rarely missed any family get-togethers. In fact, he and his wife were the first to arrive at our party when we were out in California last month.

Yesterday, I learned that Uncle Morris had died on Saturday. They found him lying back on his bed, with his feet on the ground as if he were just about to get up. Thankfully, it was quick.

Uncle Morris, in true form, left us one last anecdote…

The Molokan church has their own cemetery. They use plain white coffins that, I guess, only come in a couple of different sizes. But, Uncle Morris was a large man and none of the coffins in stock were deep enough to fit him. They had one that was long enough. They had one that was wide enough. But, none of them were deep enough to fit his large belly. So, an extra deep coffin had to be special-ordered just for old Maury.

You may think that it is morbid to talk about things such as this, but this is just one of those stories that, if it were about someone else, Uncle Morris would have told it to us kids a hundred times.

While at our party in July, my brother took advantage of the gathered family members and was trying to complete a family-tree project for school. Uncle Morris, because of his wealth of familial knowledge, was able to run through almost every family member, by name, complete with little stories about each one of them — that is almost five generations of Russians, beginning with the first immigrants (as he was) to America — and he remembered every John and every Mary (almost every man’s or woman’s birth-name in the Russian culture).

Uncle Morris leaves his wife Nikki and two kids. We will all miss him…and his stories.

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