This morning before work, I was reading a year-old Vanity Fair article about the discovery of a cache of Ernest Hemingway’s never-before-published correspondence in his old house in Cuba, which the Cuban government has maintained all these decades since his death as a virtual time capsule/shrine/museum. An interesting story, to be sure, but there was one odd little detail mentioned in passing about Papa’s house that caught my eye:

The connecting bathroom had a doctor’s scale, and on one of the walls, Hemingway had recorded his weight daily. It ranged from 242 pounds on February 21, 1955, to 190 1/2 pounds five years later.

As it happens, those numbers are almost identical to my own weight readings over the past year. That’s neither here nor there, of course, but considering the way I used to identify with Hemingway in my younger days — aside from his final bit with the shotgun, and the fact that he actually wrote fiction instead of just talking about it, the way I do — well, it struck me as an interesting coincidence…