Bundt
Swannanoa
2005
Outside it was snowing heavily. The wet snow caught on the pine tree branches and the rhododendron leaves. I had breakfast that day in the kitchen of the dorm where all the Warren Wilson faculty stayed. I didn’t want to go to the cafeteria because of the snow. I was eating a bagel and reading the obituaries of The New York Times to Linda Gregerson who was making her breakfast. That morning, the morning it snowed, I read that H. David Dalquist had died. He was 86. He founded Nordic Ware and invented the modern “Bundt” pan in 1950. He trademarked the name, used modern materials to make it, and added the signature regular folds, a guide for cutting slices. The invention really took off, the obit said, when a recipe for a “Tunnel of Fudge Cake” took second prize in the 1966 Pillsbury Bake-Off. Linda listened raptly, and then she wanted to read the obit aloud, glossing the story as she read. I listened, chewing my bagel. We both thought then that there had to be, had to be a poem in there someplace.