I entered the park at 72nd St. and ran into a wall of meandering tourists at the Imagine mosaic. “Coming through! Hot Coffee! Watch your back! Lady with a baby!” Spring has arrived in Central Park: yellow daffodils, purple wood hyacinth, blue myrtle and green hellebore. The trees are still largely bare, but forsythia and magnolia are showing color. The sky today was cloudless.

At Bethesda Fountain, I stopped to say hello to Arlen and Meta, who have teamed up to do harp and dulcimer duets. They’re hard core street musicians, having worked through this winter, except on the most frigid days. Arlen’s been at this longer than me; he showed me the ropes when I first started busking. “Oh, great,” he said when he saw me, “it’s that damned ukulele again.”

Following the path toward the Boathouse, I saw that my second location was occupied by Nick, the handwriting analyst. This year he seems to have added water colors to his menu of goods and services. Farther along, just past the stairs leading under the roadway, I set up shop: paper leis, CDs, business cards, a plastic hula-hula doll, one sign that says “This is Culture”, and another that asks “Got Aloha?”

Over the years, I’ve observed that the English have a thing for the ukulele. A family of four from Oxford stopped to do a hula, two tow-headed children gamely waving their arms, Dad shouting instructions, while Mom took pictures. A little later I sang Happy Birthday to a girl from Brighton. Each dropped a fiver in my case. I got another couple of bucks from a group of teenage boys from Toronto. They were staying in New Jersey, had just arrived by bus and wanted to meet girls…or wahinis, as they took to calling them.

Mine was a ragged performance today. I blanked out on chords for songs I’ve played 1000 times. Nevertheless, the day was so beautiful I played for almost 2 hours and took in $21.20. As I was packing up, a Central Park Conservancy worker stopped his cart in front of me. “Winter must be over,” he said, “now that the ukulele’s back.”