The air was thick with the scent of summer roses.  I had a Proustian recall of my boyhood home where, in summer, my mother kept the living room supplied with fresh-cut roses from the back yard.  Summers then consisted of sticky drives to swim clubs and boarding house rentals at the Jersey shore with my cousins.  At 9, I went to a YMCA camp for the summer, then to Boy Scout camp.  There, at Ken-Etiwa-Pec, I picked up a uke for the time.

“Hi, cowboy,” I said.  He was walking away as I approached.  Last summer, the cowboy and I both played on the same stage, and had reached a détente.  He left around 12:30; I set up when he was gone.  The other buskers were in place, the Boyd Family and Friends, the Big Bubble Man, and, new to the mix, an all green Lady Liberty on stilts.

Three teenagers came by.  “Have you got time for a hula today?”

“Does it cost anything?”

“Nooo,” I sang out.  One of the girls put on a lei and hula-ed to the hukilau.  Her friends videoed the dance, then each put a dollar in my case.

A well-dressed woman of a certain age came by a little later and added another dollar.

A toddler toddled up to me, her dad close behind.  She was coy, but I had a special baby lei for her and that did the trick.  At the end of the dance, a crowd of people, who had gathered to see the cute hula girl, applauded.  Dad gave me a fiver.

The mood of the park deteriorated after that.  First, a woman showed up and started loudly digging refundable cans out of the trash.  Later, the bearded, bare-chested homeless man climbed into the fountain and started his search for silver.  At the same time, a kid of 8 or 9 also climbed into the water, as if it were a swimming pool.  He had adult supervision, a man with a bike, who exerted no control.  The kid collected copper, building stacks of pennies on the fountain’s inside ledge.  Resisting an impulse to engage with the man, or yell at the kid, I played, distracted, through to the end of my set.

I had $8.  As I left, I walked around to the homeless man and handed him a single.

“Thanks, bud.”

Aloha.