Everybody considered it an experience of a lifetime, and there are talks of repeat performances. After a farewell dinner, we spent the night again at El Tovar Hotel on the rim, and were on our separate ways the next morning.

While driving out, Patti got a call on her cell phone from her brother Lynn. Her father Andrew back in Arkansas was in the hospital where he had gone for a pain down his arm. They had put a stent into him (like Dick Cheney) and he was doing fine. Patti called Scott (who was in New Jersey) and asked him to call the hospital for more details. They seem much more willing to talk to a doctor: Andrew had had a heart attack and was in Intensive Care. After all this calling back and forth we had reached Lake Havasu City in southern California, but decided to turn around (after some hemming and hawing) and head for Arkansas. We arrived in Rogers a day and a half later, and Patti was able to see her father that afternoon (Thursday). He was very comfortable and looked healthy; they were going to take him out of ICU that later that day. Patti's sister Andra, and Jennifer, had flown in from San Francisco the day before, to help take care of Burr, Patti's mother, while Andrew was hospitalized. Burr is quite frail, slowly recovering from a broken hip last fall, and numerous mini-strokes, and needs 24 hour attention, and Andrew, always devoted to her, had been spending all his time caring for her.

Andrew died suddenly early the next morning: the first heart attack had damaged the muscle too much and it just gave out. Maybe he knew something was up; in the few weeks before he had written down his funeral arrangements and finished typing up his memoirs (a wonderful 30 page story). We spent the next few days making plans and meeting all his friends and relatives.