DMC: Six-Day Weekend …

The three-day weekend became a six-day weekend.

It started as a Friday-to-Sunday fishing event, but the first guys will arrive this year on Tuesday and farewells will be Sunday.  A semblance of golf will be played Wednesday, Thursday and Friday – if the bodies hold up.  Saturday will be a day to rejuvenate muscles, watch college football and plop several racks of ribs on the fire pit.  Every evening the ritual is the same: sit around the fire ring and embellish the same stories that have been repeated year after year.

Stories like the year we had fishing competition only to discover one guy was considering buying frozen fish from the local grocery and entering them.  Some stories are sorta true, some half true.  Never heard one that is truly true.  But everybody hurts every year from laughing.  That’s the truth.

The tie that binds this group is Eau Claire High School in Columbia, S.C.  All guys are 1965 high school grads – five from EC and one a stray from Dentsville HS who qualified for admission by marrying an EC girl.  That stray is Smit.  The others in the group are aptly called Redman, Bud Lite, Weeble, Crampey and yours truly Little Richard. The names kinda indicate the fun we’ve been having the past 20 years at The Cabin.  Once a year, first week in November, be there.

The origin of our get-together reaches back to the late 1990’s.  Another high school classmate, Danny Mann, would meet me at The Cabin for some fishing back then.  Bud Lite and Redman joined us about a year later as the group began to grow.  Then Danny died suddenly in 2004.  From that year forward, we called our annual gathering the Danny Mann Classic (DMC).  Each year, the extra long weekend concludes Sunday morning on the waterfront as everybody hits a golf ball into the lake in memory of our good friend Danny.

Arrival at a DMC is like kids on Christmas morning.  Everybody brings something for everybody else – monogrammed DMC hats, shirts, golf towels, golf balls.  And snacks, goodness, enough snacks to stock a Kroger – even though everybody is well aware of the annual menu lineup.

Wednesday dinner is a low country boil; Thursday, smoked beer-butt chicken and sausage; Friday, thick steaks on the fire pit; and Saturday, fire pit ribs compliments of Redman, our master chef.  One guy suggested quiche but he hasn’t been seen since. Breakfasts are obscenely large, and evening desserts are aplenty, highlighted by Smit’s personal, popular concoction:  Krispy Kreme doughnuts topped with Neopolitan ice cream, M&M’s, marshmallows, syrupy walnuts, chocolate syrup, a red cherry, whipped cream and finished off with colorful sprinkles.  True.

Despite all of this healthy eating, we all turned 70 last year.  Amazing, but most of us have been friends for more than 60 of those years, stretching back to elementary school.  The bonds have been strengthened by significant events such as life-threatening cancer battles, major heart surgery, the loss of parents, the birth of children and the birth of grandchildren – not to mention multiple replacements of hips, shoulders and knees.  Orthopedic surgeons appreciate this group.

Highlights of these DMC gatherings are many, but a couple are noteworthy.  Danny Mann’s 84-year-old dad joined us in 2006.  Said he wanted to see first-hand why Danny enjoyed the gathering so much.  He shared several stories, which made him a natural for the group. He once built a gyrocopter by hand, crashed it on its maiden flight, but survived to tell about it.  We always called him Gyro after that, and we all attended Gyro’s funeral a couple years later.

There’s also the continuing saga about The Four Lasses, a singing group in our high school senior class.  Every time we try to remember the names of the Four Lasses, we come up with five or six names.  The closest we can come to a resolution is that there must have been five or six Four Lasses.  Anyway, we agree to think about it for another year.  We’ll figure it out.

And, there’s the case of the disappearing new pontoon.  It was safely tied up in its boathouse slip all day but then it was gone early that evening.  Just gone.  Vanished. Just before calling law enforcement, one of the guys spotted it with binoculars in the corner of a nearby cove.  An attempted theft or a prank?  Little doubt in my mind that a couple of the guys conspired with a neighbor named Bill.  But, two years later, nobody is near a confession, and everybody is a laughing suspect.

As our age continues to progress (i.e. we’re getting old), we seem to appreciate these outings – and each other – even more.  Not coincidentally, one of the guys suggested last year that perhaps it would be wise to start meeting twice a year.  So, the Mini DMC was born.

It will start as a three-day weekend.