When the sun was obscured by the dark, rain-heavy cumulus clouds, it was really cold. The button man sat under the dogwood tree with his hoodie pulled up around his ears. The brisk wind made it worse. The chestnut tree looked terminal, and the 4 little winter-burned rhododendron had been dug up; the brown circles of earth remaining were filling up with dead leaves.

When I got to center stage the wind had driven away the heavy clouds and the sun felt hot on my arms and face. As I set up, a monarch butterfly fluttered toward the lake. First it would rest on the warm bricks, wings slowly rippling up and down, like an idling engine. People approached close enough to take pictures. Then it burst into the air, no more than a few feet high, and continued its erratic journey. At this rate, Mexico seemed a stretch.

A pair of girls from Alabama gave me a dollar and danced the day’s first hula. One from a trio of Chinese girls danced the second, returning to her friends afterward to view the pictures they’d taken. They took more pictures of a little girl who did the next hula, and saw her mom put something in my case, then they walked away.

An Asian 20-something man, who had been watching from the bench, came over with $2. And I got another $2, from a half dozen Canadian girls from Alberta, “above Montana,” one told me.

The crowds kept coming, most in heavy cloths, many in hats and gloves. Yet in the sun it was glorious. As I sang, I lost track of who gave me what. People came up from the benches, little kids, old men. Someone had tossed in a fiver. One guy was a Finn. A 50-something man sauntered over and shook my hand, saying, “I like your enthusiasm.”

A 2-year old girl, Lola, sat cross-legged on the brick, elbows on knees, chin in hands, eye-level with my solar powered toy hula dancer. She was mesmerized. “She can’t hurt it,” I told a concerned-looking mom. Putting my uke aside, I asked Lola to sit next to me, while I took the toy apart and showed her the copper wire coil inside, and the magnet attached to a pendulum connected to the hula dancer’s arms. I left out details of Maxwell’s equations. Reassembling it, voila, the hula dancer danced, and so did Lola.

“Yay,” we both shouted at the end of the song. Her mom gave me back the lei and buckled Lola into her stroller, whereupon they strolled away. Listeners on the north side gave me $1. Listeners on the south side gave me 2. At the end of my set, I had $19.50. With Lola on her shoulders, Lola’s mom came back with something for me. I love it when I break 20.