I had a wonderful family including my aunts, uncles and cousins but they've all gone to heaven.
Mobile is a seaport town, and we ate a lot of seafood. We'd go fishing, we'd catch our fish and we'd eat our fish. It was a ritual on Saturday morning for all my family - my grandfather, my brothers, my uncles, my father - to go fishing, and then the ladies of the family would clean the fish and fry them up.
Parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, aunts and uncles are made more powerful guides and rescuers by the bonds of love that are the very nature of a family.
The great thing about getting married young like I did and having a child so young is that he gets to know all the relatives. He knew his great-grandmother, and we sat down together and tied down the stories of our uncles and aunts. They were quite the characters, and we tied them to about 50 recipes. It's like a memoir-cookbook.
I was in Vietnam, and I was exposed to Agent Orange. And there's a high relationship between people that were exposed to Agent Orange and the kind of lymphoma that I had. The prostate cancer was genetic in my family. My father had prostate cancer, my - three of my four uncles had prostate cancer.
I come from an enormous and very close family. I have over a dozen aunts and uncles in Pakistan, dozens of cousins. I have many close friends. I have received so much love in Lahore that the city always pulls me.
Our house was always full of grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins.
We live in a world where we have friends, neighbors, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, people we journey with for years who are gay. And we need to love, affirm and all of us together work on the real problems that we have in the world.
Across the board, from my mother to my father to my aunts and uncles, everybody has always given me a lot of love.
I don't have a creepy uncle, but I certainly have many, many uncles. My mom has twelve brothers and sisters, and my dad has two sisters and three brothers. Their maturity level is still hovering around fifteen when they all get together, but they're not necessarily creepy.