Baking Bread to Save My Soul

Once I would take my anxieties out on the road and run long distances. I would sense an anxiety episode beginning as a small flame, but then as if it came into contact with an accelerant it would blaze up and overtake me. In such moments and regardless of the weather, I knew it was time to run. I would strip quickly out of my street clothes, change into my ready running gear, lace up my Asics running shoes and strap onto my arm the ready radio or programmed iPod, settle the headset into my ears and head out to the road. On the radio the station was always set to WNEW-FM or to the NPR station local to New York City or to Wisconsin and Minneapolis; the iPod playlist I had created was set on random so that the music seemed always new. I was ready to run and hoped for some relief from my anxieties and even for some healthy activity that might help me live longer and make a pint of ice cream and a beer acceptable. After a mile out there I would be calmed and during the rest of the run—anywhere from six to twenty miles—I would continue to decompress. I could return home.

Alas, I still suffer my anxieties but I no longer run. Oh, I get my out-of-doors walking in almost daily, but the walking . . . well, it just doesn’t yield the same relief as the efforts of the run. For one thing, there isn’t the sartorial change into a different frame of reference. The music remains and it often sustains me, but the anxieties do not dissipate, are not pounded out, perhaps because the type of effort in walking does not afford that release. And so, today, when I experience the onset of anxiety, I bake bread. Not that this is a new activity. I have baked bread and other goods for the household for at least 30 years: muffins, cookies, cakes, pancakes and waffles. But then there were two daughters in the house and well, they happily ate whatever I had that day baked.

            I live alone now—the daughters are grown and live in a different city, but my anxieties have not—do not—adjust to the altered domestic population. In my anxieties I bake a great many breads, and I keep on the counter for consumption a single loaf and in my freezer I store what I produce. As I write at present there are three baguettes, two sourdough loaves and a challah, and as a sourdough Italian loaf is rising in the proofing box. Oh, I do share my stash, but in my recurring anxious moments I return to the baking and refill the freezer. One of the Hobby-Horses in my well-stocked stable that I ride frequently fears that the supply will run out—it is an old Hobby-Horse—and I will suffer hunger and deprivation. I recognize how this particular Hobby-Horse had been acquired, and though over the years I have tried to rid myself of it, I have not been able to do so. But I appreciate that the baking harms no one and that I can gift loaves satisfies me. And the baking of bread absolutely relieves my anxieties.

            I wonder that if we could help people find some means to relieve their anxieties—their particular Hobby-Horses—then perhaps the newspapers would not be so horrifying to read. (Actually, I can’t read much of a newspaper except for the Arts section and the Obituaries. If I’m not there I know I’m not dead. And I am not overly fond of the contemporary journalistic style of writing/reporting). And then I think we need to be more tolerant of the Hobby-Horses of others. As Tristram Shandy avers, “But everyman to his own taste—Nay . . . Sir, have not the wisest of men in all ages, not excepting Solomon himself,—have they not had their Hobby-Horses; their running horses,—their coins and their cockle shells, their drums and their trumpets, their fiddles, their pallets,—their maggots and their butterflies?—and so long as a man rides his Hobby Horse peaceably and quietly along the King’s highway, and neither compels you or me to get up behind him,—pray Sir, what have either you or I to do with it?” Me, I bake bread and I’m not hurting anyone. Acknowledgement of our own Hobby Horses and those of others might make for a safer and more pleasant world. We might perhaps care better for each other.