Last month, just before the Day of the Dead, my sister called me from Georgia to tell me that our Uncle Shangler had died in the VA Hospital. He had suffered from dementia for several years and his passing was really a blessing to his family and friends. When I think of him I would rather remember him in happier times. 

Uncle Shangler and Aunt Lorell lived out on the Cochran Short Route, about ten miles outside Macon, Georgia. He was a veteran of WWII, which newsman Tom Brokaw called “The Greatest Generation.”

I don’t think he was really my uncle. He was the son of Granny Owens, who wasn’t really my grandmother. Granny Owens was the sister of Mama Lily, who was my grandmother. I think that makes him my first cousin once or twice removed but it doesn’t matter; I’ve called him Uncle Shangler all my life. It’s too late to change now.

After he retired, well, as much as a man who’s worked hard all his life can retire, he kept a garden the size of Rhode Island and tended several bee hives. He raised sugarcane and made his own syrup that he advertised with a hand-lettered sign on the road by the mailbox that read, “Homemade Syrup.” After the syrup making was over in the fall, he and Aunt Lorell used to have a family reunion they called the Syrup Soppin’ Supper.The syrup making was the excuse for the supper but perhaps not the reason. We all seem to need to mark the passage of time by celebrations, and the harvesting of the crops and the completion of all that sweet syrup makes a very compelling metaphor for a family celebration.

The first time I went to the Syrup Soppin’, my wife, Ann, and I drove over with Mama and Daddy. We were the first ones there. When we walked in, Aunt Lorell was making biscuits. She had an old wooden dough tray on the counter and she had flour up to both elbows. There were already three baking sheets on the table with two dozen on each sheet, ready for the oven.  

Biscuits for syrup soppin’ have very exacting specifications. They have to have a hard crust, otherwise they’ll come apart when you drag them through the thick syrup, but they need a soft center to soak up a big gob of home-made butter. They need some size to them too, at least two or three bites before you get your fingers in the syrup. They need to be big but not quite as big as cat head biscuits. Cat head biscuits are better for gravy soppin’.

There’s another way to eat syrup and biscuits but it’s not approved for semi-formal or formal occasions like the Syrup Soppin’ Supper. Under the less fastidious conditions of a tractor pull, mud boggin’, or coon hunt, it’s perfectly acceptable to poke a hole in the biscuit with your thumb (removing your thumb smartly if the biscuits are just out of the fire) and insert a dob of butter and then pour in the syrup. This method has the advantage of not being as messy until you take the first bite, then all bets are off.

Aunt Lorell is no blushing bride. These weren’t the first biscuits she’d baked. She knows biscuits. In fact, she may have written the specifications for syrup soppin’ biscuits.

While she was up to her elbows in the biscuit tray, the rest of the feast bubbled on the stove. The aroma had our mouths watering as soon as we got out of the car.  Caldrons of turnips and mustard greens, shoulder to shoulder with kettles of butterbeans and black eyed peas, side by side with pots of squash and okra perfumed the kitchen. Roast beef and a tom turkey shared pride of place with every part of the pig except the squeal. Cakes, pies, home-made ice cream, and Aunt Lane’s strawberry trifle lurked like sugar bombs on the side table in the dining room.

You didn’t really think we were only having syrup and biscuits, did you?

Soon the house started filling up with aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends, some I’d known all my life and some I’d never met. Ann and I were middle-aged (if you planned to live to a hundred) and we soon realized we were the youngest people there. That was good because old people know how to eat. If the clientele of a restaurant looks like the audience of a Saturday matinee of “Driving Miss Daisy” you can relax, the food will be fittin’ to eat.

When we had a full table, Uncle Shangler was ready for folks to start eating. Stragglers and young kids would have to eat at the kitchen table. He welcomed everyone and especially the newcomers then asked the blessings of a benevolent God, though it was plain that we were all doing well in the blessing department, just being in such company with such a table before us.

In deference to those of you on a diet I’ll forego my description of the meal except to say that it was delicious and everyone did justice to it.

After coffee and dessert, Aunt Lorell got out a box of old photos and we spread them out on the table, looking through them for images of our family’s past. Soon, oft told tales, smooth and slick as river rocks from retelling, were going around the table.

About the North Atlantic in a winter storm with German submarines all around, and why Uncle Shangler won’t buy a Volkswagen.

About Cousin Woody’s assessment of the cotton crop to Granny Owens, as they walked through the fields. “It’ll be okay if the goddamned boll weevils don’t eat it all.” He was three years old at the time.

And about Mama’s beauty advice of a cow manure poultice to clear up a classmate’s acne. It worked too. When the skin on her cheeks grew back, it was flawless.

We looked at pictures of long dead soldiers, standing in front of ’32 Fords, looking out at us as if they could see across the years and we wondered how long before we would be staring across that same  divide? 

Family reunions are nourishment for the body and the spirit. Some of us, a lot of us, don’t need the extra calories but we all need the closeness, the sharing of memories, and the feeling of family.  We were full to the brim with all those things when we left the Syrup Soppin’ Supper.