How It Started– How It’s Going PARKER KIRBY 64 • NOVEMBER 2022
This is a story about being intentional with time... It’s kinda like that feeling you got as a kid on Christmas morning. The anticipation of it would put butterflies in your stomach. When I asked the others in the group how they would describe the mission, they used words like adventurous, exciting, memorable, and special. Since just about as long as I can remember, the “Secret Mission” trip has occurred right around Christmas—when all of us were out of school. When it started, there were four of us kids. One family had a baby brother at home that was too young to go. I can remember getting ready to go on our first ever trip and the nervous excitement I had about it. Now I look back thirteen years later, and over 21,000 miles traveled, and I’m more excited than ever to go on the next one. The Kirbys, the Heimers, and the Drydens have always been close. Being neighbors and friends since we were all practically born made it easy for us to become a close group. The group included our dads, Bill Heimer, Jamie Dryden, and Michael Kirby, and the kids, Anna Grace Heimer and her sister Emma, Sara Foster Dryden and her brother Jack, and me, Parker Kirby. Jack was just a toddler when this started so it would be a few years before he’d join us. Every Saturday morning, our dads would take us all to Chick-fil-A. For the dads, it was a chance to give the moms an opportunity to run errands or do things around the house without the kids underfoot. And for the kids, it was a great excuse to play! As our dads would sit there and have their coffee, they started brainstorming on what a little “day-trip” with the kids might look like. I don’t think any of us could anticipate what would come from it. So, one Saturday, they decided to shake things up from our normal routine. We were told that instead of going to Chick-fil-A, we’d be doing something new. When we asked exactly what that would entail, all we were told was, “It’s a secret. You’ll just have to find out.” And with that single mysterious statement, we were hooked. All we were told was that the day would begin at the train station in Jackson. I was six years old so getting on a train was a huge deal, in and of itself. We killed a little time by going across the street to the King Edward Hotel to get a picture in front of their hotel lobby Christmas tree. (This has since become a very important part of the tradition.) A little while later, we boarded the train, took our seats, and eventually started to pull out of the station. From that moment on, we were anxious at every stop, hoping that we had reached our final destination. We eventually made it to Brookhaven and spent the next seven hours going around the town completing a scavenger hunt that our dads had created for us—and exploring as much as we could. The scavenger hunt called for having a picture made with a police officer, singing a Christmas carol in public, and getting a picture with Santa Claus, among other things. At the end of the day, we hadn’t made it fifteen minutes down the tracks, headed back to Jackson, before we were asking where we were going next year! And with that, the Secret Mission was born. All of us were very young at the time of this first trip—yet I remember just about every detail of that day thirteen years ago. It was hard for us to recognize the magnitude of the tradition that had just been created, yet all of us seemed to understand how important the secret mission would be to us in the future. The Brookhaven trip was a blast! But the dads were about to catch a whole different gear. In hindsight, although the first secret mission wasn’t necessarily the most exciting trip we’d take, it definitely laid the groundwork for the trip as we know it today. The next few years were filled with new experiences. We went to New Orleans, Memphis, and Little Rock, with more and more anticipation and excitement every year. And bear in mind, we never knew where we were going. We got to experience trolleys, the Peabody ducks, and even a little snow! And being able to experience these things with the group at such an early age was even better. From the team building we had completing scavenger hunts to the closeness we gained playing card games late at night, the true meaning of the secret mission was becoming obvious. The trip was much more than a chance for the dads to get away for a weekend or for the kids to Hometown MADISON • 65