In January I bought new strings for my tenor ukulele. My usual brand, Hilo, had gone out of business, so this year I’m playing with a set from Kamaka. It takes a few days for new strings to settle down, but with the arrival of 70 degree weather yesterday, I had no such luxury. Having been cooped up all winter, I wasn’t going to let such a beautiful day slip away.

Except for a few shiny hollies near Central Park West, and a sparse assortment of evergreens deeper in the park, the trees were bare. The park was bathed in hazy grays and browns. The beds at the entrance at 72nd St. had been raked; snowdrops shyly bent their faces to the ground. Tightly clustered tulip leaves pushed several inches high behind the freshly painted wooden benches. On both sides of the path leading away from Strawberry Fields, red dogwood branches stood taller than me. In the distance, I could see a single yellow daffodil. The magnolia near the drive was covered with furry thumb-like buds.

Past the statue of Daniel Webster, I could hear the cheers for the acrobats that work the northern end of the mall. At Bethesda Fountain, Rakeem played his saxophone. “Another 10 minutes,” he told me. By noon, I was spreading out my paraphernalia, solar-powered hula girls, multi-colored leis, an open ukulele case primed with 2 singles and 2 written messages, one reading “This is Culture,” the other “Got Aloha?”

After playing for 30 minutes or so, re-tuning my new strings between every song, a large contingent of Chinese teenagers arrived, neatly dressed in uni-sex blue blazers with red scarves, for the girls, and red ties, for the boys. When 2 of the girls applauded at the end of a song, I invited them to dance the hula. They giggled and whispered to each other, then walked up to get their leis. It was the first trip to the Hukilau of 2016. A young man dropped a handful of change in my case between verses. At the end of the dance, the girls returned to their stone bench, dug out their wallets and returned, each holding out a $5 bill. The girls were in New York for a special program at the United Nations.

Some time later, 3 girls from Wisconsin walked by, but only one would dance, for which I received a dollar.

A group of 11- and 12-year-olds came running down the path toward me. “Who’s in charge here?” I asked.

“I am, I am,” several announced.

“Have you got time for a hula today?”

“Yeah,” they screamed, reaching for the leis.

“NO,” came the true voice of authority, a slender young woman with a clipboard and hell’s fury in her eyes. “I’m trying to teach a lesson,” she warned me, while a few adults wrangled the youngsters toward the rim of the fountain, where they overwhelmed my case and fidgeted as the teacher alternately shouted instructions and threats. The purpose of the lesson was to “daylight” the streams that flowed here in 1609.

So it was I packed up early, with a quite respectable $12.36 in my pocket.