There’s a game I play with Zoe with a Matrioshka doll set painted with the likenesses of Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev. She’s fascinated with them, as she is with a more traditional Matrioshka we have, both gifts from my globetrotting aunt. One night recently , as she sat on my lap at my desk and she was fumbling with them, I took the second largest, painted like Leonoid Brezhnev, and said in a very bad imitation of a heavy Russian accent, “comrade Brezhnev geeve you keeses,” and pressed the head of Brezhnev up against her cheek, making kissing noises. She thought it was hysterical. I never thought Leonoid could be so funny. But I notice that the artist who made the toys conveniently skipped over Andropov and a few other, more unsavory Soviet heads of state in between Brezhnev and Gorbachev. I guess you could never make Andropov cuddly. Somehow, I doubt Putin will ever be made into a Matrioshka doll. Yeltsin, on the other hand, will undoubtedly be a Matrioshka–that conceals a vodka flask.

BOF Session in my backyard

Last year, I put up a bird feeder in my backyard. Being in the “greatest city in America”, I didn’t expect much; sparrows, house finches, and flying rats, mostly. And that’s what I got. Until this last fall, when the goldfinches started showing up around the sunflowers we had planted.

However, that didn’t prepare me for the crowd in my backyard this last week. It was a black bird blowout–Red-winged blackbirds, boat-tailed grackles; I thought I was in a salt marsh or something. They were pigging out on birdseed and making a ruckus.

Paula called me from her cell phone and told me to come to the window to see; she was in the car with the kids, and had just pulled into the driveway. They were sitting in the car, watching the mob up close and personal as they emptied the feeder. A few “rock doves” joined in, while the house sparrows watched mostly from the sidelines waiting for the crowd to thin.

We’ve been in this house for more than five years, and I’ve been in Baltimore for 11. And I don’t recall seeing this many RWB’s–or any grackles to speak of–inside the city before. Maybe it’s the drought. Maybe we’re on a migratory lay-over map somewhere posted by a crow on the bird Internet. Who knows? We appreciated the visit anyway.