Most of the time I try not to dwell on the fact that I am old enough to qualify for AARP membership. Excepting the gray hair, my self-image is that of a woman in her early to mid thirties. This shouldn't seem too odd if you consider how much I've "reversed" in getting my diabetes, blood pressure, and cholesterol under control, working out, and training for my first half-century bicycle ride. Count backwards eight years from forty-two, and well...

Still, the clues of age are there: the bifocals I've had for at least five years, the progression of cold-intolerance, the increasing frequency with which I feel physical stress from repetitive motions, and the tendency to remind everyone that during the 1974 Watergate hearings, the phrase "(expletive deleted)" became, in itself, an expletive...

They say, "bread is the staff of life". The way things are going, I may need "the two canes" instead.

From the time I picked up a good bread cookbook in university, I've loved baking bread. The feel of the dough in my hands as I knead it, the physical exertion from my feet through my back and arms into the resistant lump on the table, the fragrant smell of yeast rising, and the taste of the finished loaf hot from the oven. Time, space, cost, and diet have made home breadmaking a bit of a luxury, but when I had several cups of sour milk on hand, it was time to make a new batch of sourdough starter.

There's a certain degree to which baking bread "is like riding a bicycle": you never quite forget the way the dough is supposed to feel, how it's supposed to behave, and so on, though trying a new recipe after a long hiatus may test your self-confidence. The recipe I used called for additional yeast, an electric mixer, and an odd order in which that yeast would be proofed. For the most part I'm not an electric-appliance type of woman; however, there are a few basic tasks (whipping cream, whipping egg whites) for which an electric mixer is invaluable. Baking bread generally is not one of those tasks. On the other hand, I've been finding my own strength somewhat wanting when kneading this particular dough.

Because I haven't needed the features of the professional Kitchen-Aid I had use of in college (nor could I afford one) I've had an inexpensive handheld -- which I used less than two dozen times over the five or so years I've had it. The mixer did come with dough hooks, and feeling a bit adventurous, I decided to try them out. In the process, I burnt out the mixer's motor.

I'm not upset about losing the mixer this way: despite the enclosed accessories, I was pretty certain that kneading dough would be pushing it to its limits. My search for its replacement, though, has forced me to confront my body straight on.

Holding the electric mixer steady while it was trying to churn through dough turned out to require almost as much hand power as working it by hand, and anyone watching me try to turn the bowl in the opposite direction to the beaters would have died laughing. These factored into my decision to replace the dead handheld with a convertible mixer that should be light enough and small enough to put away when I'm not using it, simple enough to use by hand for the easy stuff (like egg whites), and stable enough on a stand to allow me to use both hands as necessary to manipulate food preparation.

As well as being safe enough to use when I can no longer hold the mixer steady myself.

Damn, I'm getting old.

Re: "the two canes": I was the first great-grandchild for all of my mother's grandparents. When I was a baby, my eighty-something-year-old Sephardic great-grandfather is said to have promised my parents and grandparents that he'd go down the aisle at my wedding, "even if I have to walk with the two canes". He passed away shortly after my sister's first birthday, leaving a wife, eight children, a dozen or so grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, and a long legacy of family stories.