Beginning

The name of this blog.  “At Every Gate” is from Emily Dickinson, #453 (she didn’t title her poems, and neither does her editor, R.W. Franklin).  The last stanza goes-

Retreat – was out of Hope- / Behind – a Sealed Route – / Eternity’s White Flag – Before / And God – at every Gate.

Who I am.  And why.  This is a family blog, meaning it’s about family.  I am Dad, Skip, Dr. Stevens to some, Ralph to others.  Just in case you want to know.  For purposes of this blog I happen to be the pater familias a title I adopt because I’m the oldest member of the family and I happen to be a father.

The audience for this blog is the members of my family.  This simply means that when I write I am thinking of my family, I am writing to them.  But this is a public blog.  I don’t mind others reading it, and those who do are members of my “blog family.”   And if you are not a Stevens or related to a Stevens, please don’t be confused if what you read doesn’t seem to include you.  I have no intention of excluding anyone; I am just addressing members of my family and not the world in general.  I only hope that you who read this, whether family or not, are folks who will cut me some slack.  I like to think that those who read are people who could watch me having a nightmare and still be kind to me.

Why.  Meg says, “Why do you never tell us these things!!”  “I’m sorry, Meg, I guess it just never came up in conversation, that we used to live on a boat in Seattle, or that your Aunt Jeanne and I used to read Winnie the Pooh together when she was a little girl.”  But eventually it does, of course–come up in conversation.  And then I realize that there are a lot of things I wish I knew about family, things that did NOT come up in conversation when I was a boy, and that probably are not coming up in conversation now.  And then there’s the problem of communication, of sharing news about what’s going on now in the family, information that at least some, and sometimes all, family members need to know.  “Hey, everybody, Ben just called from the Arctic Titan and said the Whittier trip might be delayed because of electrical problems on the boat.”  That sort of thing.

Why this blog, then?  Two purposes.  Keep the family informed, and tell something of the family story.

My mom–Grandma Ruth to some of you, Aunt Ruth to others–kept a blog.  Only in those days it wasn’t called “blog” which as you know is short for “web log.”  She didn’t live into the Internet age, so she simply called it a log, “The Stevens Log.”  It was a journal (a daily record, after the French for day, “journee,” which if I remember correctly is the origin of “journey” meaning how far one could travel in a day–but I’m getting off the subject)–a record of our life on “The Island,” which was the name we gave our place on the Sheepscot River.  After we moved in (this was in 1950, on my seventh birthday), my dad went to sea, so Mom was left alone on The Island with two boys, a seven-year-old and a four-year-old, our brother Blackie, who had turned four the previous March.  A city girl, in an isolated farmhouse in Maine, with no telephone, and a mile from the nearest neighbor, facing a Maine winter with two little boys to take care of.  So she started blogg–uh, logging.

It’s good for families to tell their stories.