The Doctors Gave Me a Death Sentence. Thirty Years Later, I Drove Away in an RV.
More than thirty years ago, I was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. I was not supposed to be here. I have been quietly aware of that fact every single day since — and I have not always known what to do with it.
For most of those years, I did what I knew. I ran a gallery on the Palm Beaches. I built something real, something lasting, a place where art found its way onto walls and into lives. It was a good life. A full one. But there is a particular kind of restlessness that comes with survival — a knowledge that time is not abstract, that the road does not wait, that at some point you have to stop preparing to live and simply go.
So I did. I sold the gallery. I loaded up a 28-foot RV. I brought my dog, Bella. And I drove west.
"Storms force early stops. Sunrises reward patience. The road turned out to be a better teacher than I expected."
What followed was not a bucket list. It was something quieter and stranger and more honest than that. Back roads through small towns. National parks at dawn. Deserts that made me feel very small and very alive at the same time. Campgrounds where I met people whose names I still remember. Coastlines I had no words for until I sat with them long enough to find some.
I moved slowly. Attentively. Without urgency — which, for someone who spent three decades running a business, was its own kind of revolution.
Between Storms and Sunrises is the book that came out of that journey. It is a memoir about America as much as it is about me — about what you see when you leave the interstate and take the back roads, about aging and memory and the long aftermath of survival. About what it means to travel not as escape, but as presence.
Part One — the first in a four-book USA Tour series — is available now on Amazon Kindle. I want to be completely honest with you about what it is: a first draft. The words came before the polish, written close to the road, close to the experience. They are real in a way that revision sometimes smooths away.
This text edition is also, quietly, a way to fund what comes next. The complete book will be illustrated with my own photography — black and white and color images from the journey itself. Anyone who has produced a photography book knows what that costs to do properly. Every copy of this edition sold brings that version closer to existing.
You are not just buying a travel memoir. You are helping give it the images it has always deserved.
I spent thirty years helping other people share their art with the world. This is me, finally, sharing mine — and asking you to come along for the ride.
Read Part One — Between Storms and Sunrises
Available now on Amazon Kindle for $4.50. This is the text-only first draft edition. The complete illustrated book — featuring Rolando's black and white and color photography — is currently in production, funded by sales of this edition.
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