New Jamz: Tim's mine, I assure you Tim's mine.

As she tells it, my mother used to be pretty good friends with Ric Ocasek. She's lived in Massachusetts her whole life, and before starting a family in the Boston suburbs with my dad, she met Ric through her job doing artifact restorations for the Peabody Museum at Harvard.

When we were kids, my brothers and I thought this was the coolest shit in the world. "Why aren't you guys still friends?" we'd ask, and she'd say how he had started working on his solo albums, and was dating supermodels, and that her job was going very well, and that she was about to marry my father, and that they just fell out of touch.

She said they even went Christmas shopping together once.

My parents married in 1980. My older brother Tim was born in January, 1981. He's taller than I am, and I'm 6 foot 4. He's got much darker hair than my younger brother and I, and his facial features are noticeably more slender. When my brothers and I connected the dots and started making jokes about his plausible heritage on a family vacation two years ago, my dad just said, "Tim's mine. I assure you, Tim's mine." But then he just kept saying it over and over, well after the joke had dropped between us.

DJ Matt Hite "That's Just Not What I Needed" (The Cars vs. The Ting Tings)