I know that in some parts of the world, the name Lars is relatively common. These are places where lutefisk is eaten on the reg (that's fish soaked in lye, see "Leif Erikson Day" from The Holiday Month). Places where the people trace their lineage back to Vikings. Greensboro, North Carolina is not one of these places.
Despite this, or actually because of this, I love my name, and I love the fact that here in the US, you don't hear it all that often. Even when the kids in elementary school learned how to rhyme and asked day in, day out if I was from Mars (little secret: yes, I am in fact from Mars, and I've been sent here to learn all I can about your culture before returning to my homeworld...I mean, of course I'm not...that's just...ha...nuts...)
I also love that it's a family name. The man I am named after, Lars Horpedahl, was my great-grandfather, and he was a good man. A hard working, decent man that came to America to build a better life for his family and did just that. I have a lot to live up to with this name, and I can only hope that so far I've done it proud.
My middle name is Christian, and comes from my mom seeing a book by Hans Christian Andersen while she was pregggers with me. She thought to herself, "Hans Christian Andersen...Lars Christian Farabee...eureka!" The fact that my parents are now living in the hometown of HCA has a nice ring of symmetry to it.
I've heard these stories about where my name comes from countless times. I know that my parents thought long and hard about it, and I feel lucky that they landed where they did. Now it's our turn...
Elizabeth and I have been thinking about baby names long before we even found out about Nugget. In fact, we were discussing them the weekend after we got engaged to entertain ourselves on a road trip. We had several picked out (Gunner Towers and Coleman Arthur were frontrunners for a boy, Sophie and Charlotte were in the lead for girls). These were combinations of family names and names that we just thought sounded cool. And they quickly got set on the back burner as we started planning a wedding and a life together.
The news that Nugget was here to stay kicked those conversations back in to overdrive. We threw out the boys names that we had come up with very quickly (I've always loved the name Gunner, but was that the right name for my son? I wasn't too sure anymore...) The girls names changed and evolved, and we came up with three stellar ones (those won't be revealed today, sorry Mom). But after we found out that Nugget was going to be a boy, we really put our thinking caps on and tried to come up with some names. Last night, I think we made the final decision.
All of the middle names that we came up with were family names, either from her side or my side. Charles Henry (my mom's father's name for the middle name) and Walter Adams (Elizabeth's dad's family name for the middle name), are the two backups in case we meet Nugget and realize that the name we've picked isn't the right one. But the frontrunner, the one that we have landed on, is Elliot James.
I've always liked the name Elliot (he's friends with E.T., how can you not like him?). It's a cool name without being too weird or sounding like the hero in a Jules Verne novel. Tracing it's lineage back to Scotland, it's a name that has been around in some form for over 800 years (so it's got some staying power). It also has roots in the Viking Sagas, so that right there makes it a fitting name to bestow upon my first son.
The middle name is where we get into the good stuff. James is the middle name of Elizabeth's Pap-Pap, Joseph James Galgocy. One of nine children, Joseph James served in the Navy during WWII (along with three of his brothers...we have a picture of them in their uniforms and it's fantastic), and after the war became a butcher. He was the best father that he could be, and after his wife died he never remarried, instead focusing on his children and grandchildren. Elizabeth said that he was always smiling, and always ready to play with her whenever she was around. He was a kind, generous man, full of life and laughter. He's a wonderful man to name our son after.
For now, we're going to still refer to him as Nugget, both for superstitious reasons and also the fact that we like the whole Nugget thing a lot. We do want to meet him to make sure we got the name right, but seeing as we've been keen on this one for so long, I think it's the one.
A name is an important thing. It's something that will stick with you
for the rest of your life (unless you're Gordon Sumner and one day you
decide that "Sting" better fits your personality). But it's what you make of it that is the most important. Hopefully, Elliot James Farabee will be a person you won't forget.
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