I’ve been enjoying all your speculating (and your well-wishes. Thanks!) so much that I almost don’t want to explain my beamish boy’s middle name just yet. But that wouldn’t be fair, especially because there’s no way any of you could guess…

He’s named after my father, Norbert Q Felber. Who wasn’t, at birth, named Norbert Q Felber. I’ll explain.

Dad was born in Leipzig, Germany in 1931. In the late 30’s the family was forced to move, due to soaring housing costs and incipient genocide. I don’t mean to be glib about this - I lost both my grandparents and quite a lot of the extended family in Europe’s last and greatest epileptic fit. But my father and his sister made it to these shores in 1941, learned the language, and lived with a distant relative in Cleveland. By the 50’s my Dad had put himself through college and medical school. I know - an entirely impressive man he was, with giant shoes to fill. I don’t quite fill them. This is not a metaphor. Dad was a size 15. I’m a mere 14.

Anyway, when he joined the army, Dad was confronted with a problem. He had no middle name (I guess they were too expensive in depression-era Germany ), and the US Army apparently wanted him to sign “N.M.N.” or “N.M.I.” in the middle of his name every time he signed a document. My efficiency-minded father rebelled at this concept, said so, and when he found out he could choose an initial, he jumped at the chance.

Norbert Q Felber was born. He liked that he could tell people that no, it didn’t stand for anything. He liked the peculiarity of the letter. It made him laugh. And so, even years after the army, he hung onto it. I remember seeing it on various plaques and knick-knacks around his office, and my mother often affectionately called him by his “full” name.

Norbert Q Felber passed away almost a decade ago, and I still think of him every day. Hugo, Sebastian’s cousin, already has his grand-dad’s first name as his own middle name. Baz, like his grampa, and like Harry Truman, gets a simple, flexible letter as his middle name. A name that will also serve him should he choose to become an immortal, omnipotent being inhabiting an exotic continuum, manifest himself as a wrathful, winged, Aztec serpent-god, or just design GPS fountain pens that shoot poison darts for a living.

Bazket

I think it suits him.