0316 Alabaster Newsletter-WEB

Happenings
A Peep in the Mirror
Roy Wood Jr. is a retired widower in his 80’s, and
he can tell some stories. He shares about his early
days courting his wife. He tells stories of divine
providence. He tells stories with the same energy the
first time as the hundredth time. He is a natural born
story teller. Yet it was not until three years ago that
he learned that he inherited this natural gift from his
father.
When Wood was a young man in his early 30s,
his father passed away. As Wood tells it, his father
married late in life, and by the time he got around
As Wood read his father’s
words, the joy of the
moment bubbled to the
surface.
to having a family he did not have much time left to
spend with them. It was after his father’s death that
he was handed a treasure chest disguised as an old
box. “The box came to me on its own when my father
died,” Wood shared. “It is a lap desk, that’s what it is.”
The year was 1959. And what did he do with this old
lap desk full of handwritten notes, sheets of printed
music, and other penned archives from his father? “I
just put it on the shelf,” he responded.
It was not until much later in life that the “box”
started to be mined for the treasure that was inside.
“My granddaughter in-law, down in Mobile, asked if
she could take it home with her to look through it.
I said sure. After a while she came back to visit and
to return the box. She told me I should have a look
inside,” Wood recalled. Yet it was not to be. He placed
the box back where he always did, on the shelf in his
living room without opening it. And there it sat for
another two years.
It was not until his wife died that he got the desire
to really look inside. “After my wife died,” shared
Wood, “I was sitting by myself and thought of a song
my father used to sing. I thought if he wrote it, he
might have it in the box. That is when I was blown
away with all the poems, songs, and short stories.”
Within a year of opening the box Wood had the
mostly handwritten pages typed up and sent off to a
Mr. Roy Wood Jr. reading a copy of his father’s writings A
Peep in the Mirror.
printer for what would become A Peep in the Mirror, a collection
of over two dozen poems, hymns, tunes, and short stories
written by his father, brother, and even some by himself.
When Wood talks of the book he is really grasping at the
father he never knew. “My father married my mother in 1925;
as far as I can tell he wrote most of these between 1910 and
1920. My mother might never have known about most of
these,” he surmised. In the preface to the book Wood writes,
“A Peep in the Mirror is a book that had to be, for it is about
the dad I had before I knew the dad I had.”
Wood opened a copy of the book and turned to a page with
one of his favorite poems written by his father. “There Ain’t
Nuffin A-Doin” is the name of the poem and he started to
read it out loud. As Wood read his father’s words, the joy of
the moment bubbled to the surface. Wood laughed aloud at
the humorous parts of the poem, calling them comical, and
he placed all the right emphasis on all the right elements. Yet
with all the polish he reads with, it is as if he was reading it for
the very first time. All the joy, all the excitement, all the pleasure
of discovering a lost father came out into the open. It can
be summed up as the proud love of a son towards his father.
Wood is not selling these books, as he said no one could
afford them they are so special to him, but he has gifted copies
to local libraries and historical societies. To view a copy, visit
the Alabaster Senior Center, and be sure to read “There Ain’t
Nuffin A-Doin.” And try not to smile. Roy Wood Jr. is betting
that you can’t.
10 cityofalabaster.com