Stephen Rowe: Ideas and Musings: October 2012

On May 28, 1952, my nineteen and twenty year old parents named me Stephen Allan Rowe.

But what did they then know of me today, sixty years later?

I didn’t even know myself at eighteen or twenty-one! Now, October 2012, sitting down at age 60 to write this reflection…

... I do know, and have thus renamed myself: Stephen Allan Armand Filiault Rowe.

What does your name signify?

One Christmas, circa the second grade, my stocking presented a bottle of red ink and a rubber stamp, STEPHEN ALLAN ROWE, in capitals.

Using the stamp, reading those letters, felt strange – everyone had always called me “Steve” or “Steve Rowe,” and that is who I had always told people I was.

Of course I knew “Stephen Allan” was theoretically correct, but “Stephen” felt stuffy and pretentious, while “Allan”felt entirely alien, and neither names were ever used.

Yet there it was, undeniable to a seven or eight year old - bold red block capital letters proclaiming STEPHEN ALLAN ROWE. I was evidently “really” someone different from whom I felt myself to be!

Finally, many years later, I am who I am: Stephen Allan Armand Filiault Rowe. So what does this name, informed by my life experience, signify?

· Steve was a childhood nickname. Paraphrasing the Biblical Stephen, When I was a child, I spoke (and was spoken to) as a child. But now I am an elder. Stephen connotes the flower of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual maturity wrought throughout a lifetime. Far from perfected, still I feel I have outgrown my childhood nickname Steve; I am Stephen.

· Allan still feels alien, yet paradoxically, feeling alien feels ‘right’ now. I have always heard the yonder drum, have never been in step, all along the way. I wasn’t born to lead, I wasn’t born to follow. If Allan still feels a little odd, I am used to that feeling.

· Filiault is my mother’s family name, so different from the Rowes ... I had always loved the Filiaults, yet never imagined I was anything but a Rowe. Until my wife Kathy told me so around age fifty, and then it was so very obvious. The Filiaults are deeply spiritual (though not necessarily Christian), exceptionally frugal, non-conforming and non-materialistic. The Rowes … not so much. I am indeed, and have always been, a Filiault.

· My Grandfather Armand Filiault was a French Canadian who ran away from a Catholic orphanage as an adolescent, and migrated to America’s “Live Free or Die” “Granite State” of New Hampshire. He was fiercely independent, absolutely sure of himself, a stubborn, singular codger; and so am I.

Armand (Buster) Filiault’s old workshop; he made do.

· So what of Rowe? It is a practicality. No one would know me as Stephen Allan Armand Filiault. And now my son and his children are named Rowe. Finally, I would never forsake my father, Basil Charles [later Charles Basil] Rowe.