We were a typical starry-eyed newlywed couple dreaming about the future.

In a hazy honeymoon memory, I recall leaning against a hotel balcony alongside my lovely new wife, in the darkness somewhere on the east coast of Florida, discussing baby names.

My wife has a different memory; one that apparently got wiped from my internal hard drive. She says there was one name I wouldn’t tell her. It was rather uncommon and I reckon I was a bit sensitive about blurting it out. She needed to guess it. So, I made her play the legendary little “hang-man” game while we drove the interstate.

Well, the poor little man got hung good and proper, and there still remained blank spaces of unguessed letters. When I did finally tell my wife the name I had in mind, she tried to let me down gently.

“Aww…” she paused….”I don’t know… maybe if we get a horse someday you can name her that.” She knew I liked horses.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement. But what can I say? I’ve vetoed a lot more baby names in my fathering career than she ever has!

As a teenager I read Katherine Marshall’s best-selling novel Christy. Google tells me that since it’s 1967 publication, the book has sold over 10 million copies, so I guess I wasn’t the only one who found it to be an engrossing read.

Christy would be categorized as “historical fiction”, inspired by the real-life experiences of the author’s mother.

The narrative follows a 19 year old girl named Christy Huddleston who leaves her home to go teach school in a poor isolated Appalachian community.

As I remember, Catherine Marshall, through this story, expertly draws out the deep, complicated nature of human relationships and experiences. It doesn’t hold back from the real, the raw, the ambiguities that a lesser writer might shrink from.

Birth, growth, suffering, hope, joy, dreams, friendship and death…it’s all there in Christy. The final pages left me in a blubbering mess. I wept somewhere behind a locked door, knowing how difficult it would be to explain to an inquiring family member the cause for my tears.

There was a female character in the story named Fairlight. I loved everything about the name. The sound it made on my tongue, the simple yet picturesque meaning, the way it spoke to my soul’s imagination. And I thought to myself, If I ever have a little girl of my own, I want to name her Fairlight.

Many years have passed. Somewhere along the way, my wonderful woman warmed up to the name…and even started to like it!

“I think you’ll have your Fairlight someday”, she would tell me. I hardly dared to hope. God had already blessed us with two boys and a girl. Maybe Fairlight would only live in my dreams and Catherine Marshall’s best-selling novel.

I had thought about “Fairlight” so long, it was as if a little person were already attached to her name in some mysterious way. Like an old friend, who I hadn’t yet had a chance to meet.

When the ultrasound showed our 4th child to be a girl, my heart surged. God willing, I would meet my Fairlight!

Over the past months this little poem gestated in my heart, along with our growing unborn child. And this Thanksgiving weekend, as I rock my little Fairlight, I will sing it to her:

Oh Fairlight, I have known you 
As a dreamer knows a dream
Where light and shadows mingle
Mid’st the grey of in-between

Your name has long been tapping
Like a drumbeat on my heart;
Your visage long since waiting
For its fullness to impart

How silently and skillfully 
You’re crafted in the dark;
A spirit-flesh mosaic
From a supernatural spark.

Your days have all been written
By the Master of the plan,
Your thoughts already precious
To the One who holds your hand

Seems I’ve loved you now, my daughter,
For a hundred years or more –
Old time friends who’ve never spoken;
Strangers who have met before 

Now with breathless expectation
At the window of the womb
I stand, eager to embrace you-
Oh my Fairlight, welcome home!