Yesterday was to have been my farewell tour, but fortune made me the gift of today.  Seventy degrees in Central Park, the people wore their coats around their waists, and wondered, with me, at such a Day of the Dead.  In Strawberry Fields, the chestnut tree was bare; I walked around it, kicking up the leaves to reveal what few nuts remained.  Those I found had blackened shells, and the nuts inside were white and juicy.  The sister chestnut, in a stand of trees across the path, still had leaves and stood proud among the showy maples and oaks.

Carole started me off with a dollar.  I do believe she also gave me a dollar back in April, the first day of the season.

A man from the crowd tossed in a buck.  There were lots of people enjoying the park.  A man from the bench added a dollar, then another, a woman, a kid.  “You have a good voice,” someone told me.  The compliment, rarely heard, felt true today.  My baritone voice and my low-G tenor ukulele seemed especially tuneful, and in tune.

“You’re singing my favorite repertoire,” said a 40-something woman with a single in her hand.  A man dumped a handful of change in my case.  I’d lost track of who gave what.  I played for an hour without a break:  Mr. Ukulele had found his bliss.

On his way out of Bethesda Fountain, a distinguished man stopped pushing his bicycle toward the Boat House, turned and started taking pictures of me.  His equally distinguished wife stood beside him, with her bike.  When he put the camera down, they both stayed until the end of the song.  They walked off, as I’d expected they would, but then the man stopped, gave the bike to his wife and strode toward me.  He laid a dollar in my case.  “You’re a lucky man,” he said.  I first thought he was referring to the dollar, that I was lucky to get it, but of course he meant this enchanted day, this beautiful space, the blissful aloha of this moment.

A little girl came running from the other side of the fountain and gently lay a coin in my case.  I learned later that it was 1 Albanian lek, which everyone knows is equal to 100 qindarkas.

A young Asian woman, with short black hair and the face of a geisha, sat through several songs.  She appeared to be sketching, or writing in a journal.  She gave me 2 tightly folded singles, then took lots of pictures.

At the end of my set, I sat down to count $19, plus 1 lek.  Folded into the geisha’s bills was the following note:

Your song brought me

a happy moment.  🙂 ♥

Thanks for singing such

great songs, nice grandpa