As requested here is the eulogy Annalisa and I gave today: Maurizio Moras, or as we all knew him, Moe – was born on July 3, 1962 at the Sudbury General Hospital. He grew up in Gatchell and being a Catholic boy meant he did the same thing all the good Italian boys did – he joined cub scouts and became an Alter boy. He played baseball in the summer and enjoyed tobogganing on the hill behind St Anthony’s school in winter. But his real love was trucks. If you ever visited his parents’ home on Tuddenham Street you couldn’t miss the detailed model trucks proudly displayed on shelves at the bottom of the basement stairs. Unlike most of us, Moe knew exactly what he wanted to do when he grew up – drive trucks. At the age of 10 or 12 he was able to convince Copper Cliff Dairy to let him help with the milk deliveries in the Gatchell area and he proudly jumped on and off the truck as he brought the bottles of milk to each house. A lot of us talked about getting our drivers licence as soon as we turned 16 but Moe is the only guy I know that was at the motor vehicle office on his 16th birthday. He breezed through the written test and immediately booked his driving test. A few weeks later he had his driver’s licence. He soon landed a job at Ceccutti bakery helping with the bread deliveries and he loved travelling throughout the city and region dropping off bread orders at stores and restaurants. One of his first cars was a Camaro but of course when it was time to get new wheels he ended up buying a pickup truck. To thine own self be true! His other great love was good food. Back in the day if you walked around Gatchell on a Sunday you were constantly enticed by the incredible smells that drifted out from those Italian kitchens. From home-made lasagna and spaghetti, to veal and chicken dishes thanks to Maria’s great skill in the kitchen, Moe was brought up having a strong appreciation for good food. You wouldn’t know he started out as a skinny kid but there are pictures around here to prove it. He spent a number of years working for construction companies where he learned to operate most of the big machines. At our weekly family dinners he would talk about the equipment operators and how skilled they were. He had a fine appreciation for someone who could grade a road with ease or operate an excavator with precision. Eventually he bought his own truck and became an independent operator for a number of years. He even tried his hand at long-haul trucking criss-crossing Canada and the U.S. Our kids were still pretty young then and Zio Moe never missed an opportunity to play the claw game at truck stops so that he could bring toys home for Cat and Lorne. The best part of family meals for me was listening to his travel stories. He would talk about the frustration of driving through Los Angeles during rush hour and the next time tell us about trying to navigate through New York City. More than once he was told he wouldn’t be able to get the truck lined up with the loading dock because the area was too tight but they didn’t know just how experienced this guy from Sudbury was! He loved the great views on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, driving through the mountains of BC and talked about the long flat drives through the Midwest and Texas. But we weren’t the only ones who got to hear his war stories. Moe liked to get together with his buddies to get caught up on their lives over a meal and a beer at Eddie’s Restaurant or occasionally breakfast at Gloria’s. Over the last year or so he rediscovered an old passion – trains. When he was young, he had an electric model train set that he had mounted to the biggest piece of plywood I’ve ever seen. Last year he downloaded some software that let him simulate driving trains on his computer and we’d often see him at our weekly dinners with red eyes because he stayed up nearly all night driving a train across the country! It’s said that if you love what you do you’ll never work a day in your life. Moe, loved nearly every day he was driving. We lost him too early – I’m sure there were a lot of stories he still hadn’t shared at the dinner table. I guess we’ll just have to wait until we see him again.