It has to be at least 60 degrees for me go out, otherwise I’d have to break character and wear something under my aloha shirt, or something over it. Today was on the cusp. I wore socks and sneakers instead of sandals, long pants instead of short, and what I’d come to call my formal aloha shirt, a lined, 100% rayon number in purple, with white, green and gold fronds and flowers.

It was a perfect October day, as sweet and cool as a Honeycrisp apple. New mothers dressed up baby in her new fall wardrobe, tourists donned hats and scarves, and at the Imagine Mosaic all you needed was love. There were lots of shiny chestnuts on the ground under the sickly chestnut tree; few, if any, still held on to the denuded upper branches. Squirrels seemed to prefer acorns, which are plentiful.

I checked in on the wood anemone. Although still covered in buds, no more seemed to have opened; I may have seen the only one to bloom this year.

In the sun at the fountain, despite intermittent gusts of wind from the north, I was warm, and only got warmer the longer I played. A little kid ran up and tossed a dollar in my case. He ran back to his parents and, a moment later, ran back to me. “Is that a guitar?” He ran to his parents, then back to me a few more times, until I had him strumming a D chord. His parents joined us, pictures all around.

I got $2 from a couple walking by. “I’m married to a musician,” she explained.

“I’m sorry,” I said, as if I too were a musician, instead of just playing one in Central Park.

There were lots of kids in the park. Only later did I remember it was Columbus Day. After taking in a few bucks from a few pre-schoolers, a man who had been sitting nearby at the fountain with his family, dropped a dollar in my case. They were from Israel, and as we talked I learned that his wife and children were sabras, but he was born in Iraq.

“Where will you break the fast?” I asked them.

She shrugged. “At a restaurant, I guess.”

“When is Yom Kippur?” the dad asked me.

“Is he Jewish?” One of three sons, in his early teens, wanted to know, presumably about me.

A family from D.C. did the hula for a dollar. Two young Irishmen gave me two. A giggling English girl walked up from the benches with a dollar. She would not hula.

Lots of people contributed loose change. The gorgeous holiday had brought out big crowds. By the end of my set, people were sitting all around me. The bubble girl had set up to my right; the back massage lady unfolded her chair with its face pillow directly in front of me. I counted out 6 singles and $3.18 in coin. I slipped away and the crowd closed in on where I’d stood, as if I’d never been there.