After a week away from the park, I returned at the change of season. The weather was in the mid-70’s with cool gusts of wind. The sky was cloudless. The cowboy was back near my spot at the fountain, so I continued to the maple, setting up where I could easily move into the sun.

Shortly after I started my set, a family with 4 teen-aged girls walked by. Dad pulled out his wallet and gave a dollar to the eldest girl for me. She would not dance, nor would any of her sisters, whom I invited in turn.

A 40-something man, walking twin terriers, waited across the path, eager to tell me that he was on his way to meet his friend, who had colluded with one of the portrait artists on a marriage proposal scheme. Having given the artist a picture beforehand, his friend would bring his girlfriend to the park to sit for the artist, whose final product would include, voila, a diamond ring. He rushed off so excited, he almost forgot to give me a dollar. After 10-15 minutes I saw him again, walking back the other way. I stopped what I was singing and switched to “The Hawaiian Wedding Song.”

While singing “Fit as a Fiddle,” when I came to the lyric, “…how the church bells will be ringing/with a hey nonny-nonny and a hot cha-cha,” a young couple stopped in their tracks. It turned out the woman’s name was Nonny; there was laughter and handshakes all around, then off they walked.

A woman in a head scarf seemed to like “My Baby Just Cares for Me.” She took a long video, then counted out 4 quarters. A woman with a screaming child in her arms walked by, just as I was deciding what to sing next. It was “Get Out and Get Under the Moon,” a cinch to make a child smile. Mom peeked over her shoulder at her happy daughter, smiled at me. All was well.

A tall man dressed in his high holiday best took out his wallet and gave me a dollar. His wife, on his arm, beamed up at him approvingly. He had started the new year with a mitzvah.

A couple of men and women, with 5-6 kids, were picnicking behind me, on the other side of the fence. They’d finished their lunch and some of the kids got up to run. One boy, about 10, found a break in the fence and was throwing his body against it until he could squeeze through.

“You want to hula?”

“Does it cost anything?”

“Not a thing.”

Soon his brothers and sisters were squeezing through the fence to hula too. I got them lei-ed and lined up, when the eldest sister, 15 or so, egged on by the adults, got up off the blanket and wriggled through the fence. She already knew how to hula, so I instructed all the others to follow her to the hukilau. At least 2 singles found their way into my case, along with an unknown quantity of change.

Two preteens on scooters raced by, dismounted, and prevailed on the adult in charge to let them hula. They pushed and giggled their way through both verses of “The Hukilau Song.” Each gave me a dollar and hopped back on her scooter. “That was fun.”

There was close to $13 in my case when a woman and her husband passed by, stopped, walked back and asked if mine was a tenor uke. She was a 1st grade teacher, living on the west side, who wanted an instrument to play in her class, so the kids could sing along. She thought the ukulele might be the answer. I assured her, while her husband put a dollar in my case and pulled her away, it surely was.