About eight years ago, I went to the doctor to get a full checkup. I was just entering my forties, had decided to start actually exercising for once, and decided that it might be nice to see whether it was likely that I'd actually see the other end of the decade before I put any effort into fixing up the body I had been issued.

All went well. Everything checked out the way it was supposed to as the doctor listened to my chest and back, peered into my ears and eyes, and asked me to turn my head and cough. When she was done, and I was sitting on the oddly uncomfortable table in the expectedly uncomfortable paper gown, she glanced up at me.

"You know, of course," she said, "that you have to lose 10 pounds.

I've never hit a woman before, but for just a second, my hand twitched at my side.

"What?" I stammered. Never once had anyone told me I was overweight.

"You're 192," she said. "You really ought to be closer to 180."

I walked out of the doctor's office a depressed slightly overweight wreck of a man, but in the days that followed, I made a vow. I would get down to 180 and stay there till the day I died. I cut out sugar, stopped eating deserts and even (and this is the part where I get a little choked up) cut down on beer.

Within six months, I was down to 182 and holding. (In my mind, that was close enough to 180.) I had reached my goal. I walked around for weeks, smiling at my wife, patting my somewhat smaller belly, and confiding, "182!" over and over.

In the years since, I've kept the weight off. I started to eat an occasional dessert or ice cream cone. I maintained my resolve to drink less beer, but mostly because I started to buy vodka. Despite my increasing slips, the scale in our bathroom read out a steady "182" each time I stopped by. Once or twice, it got up to 184, but by emptying out my pockets and, if necessary, leaning on the sink a little, I could get it down to the magic 182 again.

This past week, though, my wife and went to the airport to pickup our daughters, who had been seeing their aunt for a week. We went to the airline check-in desk to ask about their flight exactly at the moment the airline experienced a computer glitch. The attendant apologized and thanked us for our patience, but it was a good 10-minute wait.

As we stood there, I watched a passenger heaving a big bag onto the metal scale and swear when it rang up overweight. I asked the attendant how accurate the scales were.

"They're pretty good," she said. I looked at my wife, then at the attendant.

"Can I stand on it?" I asked. She shrugged and nodded, engrossed with the computer screen. I looked around, made sure no one I knew was in the airport and stepped up.

"HAH!" I said to the attendant, "Eight pounds off! It says I'm 190! I'm 182!"

She glanced over at the display and frowned. "You're 190," she said. "Actually, 190.5!" I looked at my wife. Who was trying not to make eye contact.

"I weighed myself this morning at home!" I said. The attendant gave me a look that said, in effect, that this was fun, but I better get off the scale before she had to call TSA agents to taze me. My wife leaned in close.

"Get off there," she said. She looked around to make sure that nobody she knew was around. I refused.

"The scale at home," she hissed, "is 8 pounds off!" The attendant didn't say anything, but gave me a look that said, in effect, "Hahahahahha!"

"What?" I said. "For how long?"

"I don't know," my wife answered. "Years maybe?"

I asked her why, in all these years, as I was ballooning up to look like a manatee in a golf shirt, she hadn't said a word.

"Because," she said, "I weigh myself at the gym! I know what I weigh! It's just nice to come home and get that little lift from losing 8 pounds!"

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