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.
Despite
an ever-present, insurmountable distance between us, my last words to him were
“I’ll remember the good things …”
And indeed there are many good things to
remember.
Thus it has passed that, legal records
aside, I am today Stephen Allan Armand
Filiault Rowe. And I know what my name signifies.
 |
| Gloria Filiault Rowe at twenty |
 |
| Charles Rowe at nineteen |
 |
| Gloria Filiault at sixteen |
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| Charles Rowe at twenty-one |
