Because I am over fifty and just figuring out this blogging thing, I signed up for WordPress’s handy-dandy suggestion guide to help my launch my blog with élan. Or something like that. In any case, the second thing it advised me to do (after figuring out how to start this madness) was to blog about the origin of my blog name. And guess what? I was going to do that anyhow! So now of course I’m feeling very smug and like I’ve totally got this blogging thing down. (I just need someone to explain that category vs. tag thing for the fifth time . . .) But I digress.

Here is the story of How I Titled My Blog.

This handsome man is my paternal grandfather, Edward Alexander Moore, Jr. And the adorable baby on his lap is me. You can see him up in my banner too. He’s the dashing suited youth smiling above the two doughboys. He’s also the GI on the far right showing off his jeep.

He was Philadelphian to the core. He loved his city so much that it seems a little unfair that he was born – in Altoona, where my great grandparents briefly resided. He did his duty in the war, lost a brother there, came home, took a job at Sears Roebuck and began to climb – all the way up to Vice President of Purchasing for the Eastern Seaboard. Or something like that. It was a long time ago and memory gets fuzzy. What I do remember oh-so-clearly is him and my grandmother taking my sister and I to Chicago in the late 70s to visit the Sears Tower. We got the personal VIP tour – even visited some of the executives in plush offices that thoroughly impressed 11-year-old me. My grandfather was so proud of that building, you’d think he’d laid the cornerstone himself.

Of course I still have my ticket!

He was also as Irish as they come. All four of his grandparents had come from the Emerald Isle. He was one of seven children in a stereotypically boisterous Irish family. Visits to my great grandparents’ house meant loud, laughing uncles, cheek-pinching aunts, and Lawrence Welk on the television. My grandfather’s siblings all looked like each other and they all had that Irish sparkle. That picture up there holding his baby granddaughter? That was him, all the time. I honestly only ever saw him look anything less than joyful twice in my life.

My sister and I called him Baba and we adored him at least as much as he adored us, which was a heck of a lot. He was like one of those movie grandfathers, as far as we were concerned, perfect in every way.

But the title! Right! Well, during one visit when I was maybe six or seven – my sister two years younger – he said to us over breakfast, “Do you girls realize you have the best last name in the world?”

Since we always hung on his every word, we both looked up from our Rice Krispies (or in my case probably Gerber oatmeal because I unapologetically loved the stuff until, like, my preteens) and waited to be told why we had the best last name in the world. I’m sure neither of us questioned the basic premise. If he said it, it must be true.

“Because,” he said, casually, underplaying it perfectly, “whenever anyone likes something, they ask for you.”

Now, we were at most five and seven. We totally didn’t get it. But I think he expected that. I can still hear the exact tone of his voice as he grinned, spread his arms wide, and dropped the punchline. “They ask for MOORE!”

I’m going to be honest; I thought it was pretty corny. After all, I was a wordly-wise second-grader. I knew my way around a silly joke. But today, some 44 years later, that morning joke is one of the tiny percentage of things that happened to me back then that I have never forgotten.

My Baba died when I was twelve, but his impact on my life was profound. And yes, when I decided to bite the blogging bullet, I knew I had to find a way to use his play on words in my blog title. I like what I came up with. I like to think if he were here to see it he’d flash that grin and ask for Moore.