This summer won’t end.  The plantings in the park could use a killing frost; instead they are dying of old age.  The second growth of lantana has taken on the look of spring.  Pink roses bloom amid orange hips.  The chestnut tree, at least, looks dead and its sister tree looks not much better.  The wood anemone score:  6-20.  On the lawn to the south, people are working on their tans under yellow- and orange-leafed trees.

My first donation was from a young man who said he was a comedian.  He gave me a dollar and took my card.  A woman walking by dropped 57 cents.  A man asked if he could take a picture of me, but first I made him put on a lei.  “Where are you from?”

“I am from Paris,” he said, as if that said it all.  He gave me back the lei and walked off.

A young man from Ohio had a dollar for me.  He was from a small town outside Cleveland.  He had not come for the baseball game.  Another young man, with his skateboard tucked under his arm, chipped in another dollar.

A quintet of Venezuelan 20-somethings gathered at the fountain.  “Have you got time for a hula today?”

“We have no money.”

“That’s ok,” I said.  Usually, after a hula dance, those with no money manage to find a buck or two, but not in this case.  After the dance, they huddled over a map and set out for new adventures to the south.

A woman in her 40’s was leading 3 other people through the park.  She wanted to hula but her friends were not interested.  “I’m from New York,” she answered my question.  “They’re from Kentucky.”

“They don’t want anything to do with you,” I said, as the friends moved farther away.

“F**k ‘em,” she said, then off we went to the hukilau, after which she returned the lei and ran off.

I’d more than broken even on this slow, October day.  Finishing up “Little Grass Shack,” I sat down and counted $3.57, when a group of youngsters from Edmonton, Alberta, stopped to check me out.  “We’re doing hula dances today,” I said.

A slight woman, dressed in red, wanted to dance, so I stood up with my uke and played “The Hukilau Song.”  She was lithe and graceful.  “Is this your first public hula?”

“I dance in public all the time, just not the hula.”  She told me they’d been to the Yankee’s game last night, and were going to a hockey game tonight.  As she and her friends prepared to move on, she found a ten-spot in her wallet for me, turning a so-so outing into a winner.