The Bama Bong

The slight Hindu cast of our little group of Bad Boys at the Bacanale was hinted at in the last post. Besides our core queer pagan persuasians, and my attempt at orthodox celtic christianity, there was a cult of ganga as some a hindoo sacrament. I mentioned a Paschal celebration, which started with liturgy, and proceeded through Pascha and Kulich, and then an egg hunt and veggie dinner through fire ceremonies and piercings and people staying the night. There was a particular cultic artifact that was central to many of the ceremonies that gave this blog its name.

My great grandmother Nora Anne Davidson Caldwell made the best apple butter the world has ever known. She started with about three metric tons of apples which seem to have been grown only for her. They were deposited by a mysterious farmer--probably a faerie-- on the back porch whenever they were ready, with those that didn't fit on the groaning porch being left in the garage. My Aunt Nell's Impala had to make room for the apples. It was an Avalonian thing, probably. For days Big Momma peeled and cored and cooked those apples, and the resulting three pints had three tons of flavor. That apple butter was a sacrament. (It was probably, also, more an apple ghee.)

Such apple butter cannot be bought, but, for a while, Bama apple butter seemed as good as one could buy, and just good enough to remind me of the real stuff. I was a steady customer of Bama apple butter, so there were always Bama jars around the Bacanale. One of those jars we turned into a bong, with a chemist paraphernalia. It became, naturally, the Bama bong. Things from the Bacanale often went away, on little excursions of some sort or another, but the Bama bong managed to stay put for several months, being used religiously by the Bad Boy Shaivas. And then it was gone. And also gone was Bama apple butter from the shelves of Kaune's. I hope Bhairava brings revenge to the one who took the Bama bong from the temple.