My eldest daughter Hiziya always makes fun of my German, and I laugh with her. I did not learn the language in school, but in my daily life, from other people.
The eldest and biggest of the litter was a dog cub, and when he drew his first breath he was less than five inches long from his nose to where his tail joined his back-bone.
Mum didn't have shoes. She was the eldest of 10 kids, and some nights they went without food. That's why, from a young age, I wanted to work hard and change that cycle, to provide not only for my parents but my siblings, too.
I walk fast. I have an aversion to wasting time. My sense of constant motion is one of the reasons that my eldest daughter, Amy, nicknamed me 'the Tasmanian Devil' when she was in her teens.
As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.
My father was unemployed and I was the eldest of seven children. We were very poor. And when you ask how did we support ourselves, the only funding that we had was unemployment payments.