Use the prepend object, not sure why you need the gate.

Thank you for the answers, unfortunately none of the solutions pass the test of saving - closing - reopening the patch. As I reopen the message box is empty. @Rick, the idea of the gate was to make sure nothing passes in the right inlet of the message box at initialization. I keep experiencing an adventurous behavior in the textedit: no idea why it would discard data at reopening or keep some old one over many savings/reopenings. So I did like the idea of not even using textedit but in nicolas' patch the message box still blanks out. Maybe Rick's patch with textedit reinforced with a pattr will work, but it is a bit of an overkill. fwiw I use M4L so maybe all this is perfectly predictable with the max standalone version, but that would be weird...

When using [textedit] in M4L you need to connect a [pattr] with parameter mode enabled. This way it remembers the last data after saving the Live set.

Thank you for the new messages. @Nicolas, I really dig your method without [textedit] but the message content still changes as I reopen the patch. And [message] won't accept a pattr bindto connection. @broc, yes, I was thinking of that but even the version with [pattr] bindto the problem subsists. Comparing to Rick's solution I have even removed the [loadbang] to make sure the message box won't overwrite the textedit content, and it still doesn't work. I am a bit clueless. Here is my last attempt and a short illustration video.

http://youtu.be/jKS8lGMfwiU

You simply forgot to enable parameter mode of pattr. Here is the corrected version which works for me.

Bingo! Thank you guys. I always remember checking the "parameter enable" box for the [pattrstorage] but obviously overlooked that the same mode also exited for [pattr] I cannot imagine how many older patches this new knowledge will fix for me :P