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staying home today, Tom Terrific said. He had come down with polio. So we were minus Bearable and heading down the front steps of his house when the door opened and his mother called us back.
    "Here, Enid," she said. "Excuse me, I mean Cynthia. Take this with you, and maybe you and Joshua can identify birds in the Public Garden."
    She handed me a book and I glanced at the title.
A Field Guide to the Birds.
I stood there looking a little puzzled.
    "I heard him as you were going out the front door," she explained, "asking if Hawk would be there today."
    I laughed nervously and put the book into my backpack with my sketch pad and pencils. "Oh," I said. "He was probably thinking of a robin or a pigeon or something."
    Tom Terrific was down on the brick sidewalk, examining a caterpillar who was trying to make it
to his destination without getting squooshed. He looked up, overhearing us, and said, "It was a pigeon. I only said hawk for a joke." He squatted, picked up the fuzzy caterpillar carefully, and deposited it on the roots of a sturdy tree that was growing out of a rectangle of dirt near the curb.
    "Joshua!" called his mother in concern. "Nasty, nasty, nasty! Cynthia, do you have a Kleenex? Wipe his hands off, would you?"
    I sighed, quietly so Ms. Cameron wouldn't hear me, and wiped Tom's spotless little hands. On the tree root, the caterpillar snuggled into his little yellow furry coat, glad to be rescued from the sidewalk. Probably the instant we were out of sight around the corner, Ms. Cameron would come out with a can of insecticide and blast the poor thing away, muttering "Nasty, nasty, nasty." Then she would go off to pour tea at her meeting of the Save the Earth Society.
    "You better watch it," I told Tom as we turned the corner and headed down Chestnut Street. "Don't mention Hawk in front of your mother."
    "Or the bag ladies," he replied.
    "Or Popsicles."
    "Or dogs," he said, pausing to pat a scruffy one that had just lifted its leg against someone's
steps. The dog wiggled its behind, trying to wag a stump of a tail, and followed us down the street a short distance until it was distracted by something edible in the gutter.
    "There he is!" called Tom, dropping my hand and running ahead of me as we entered the park. "There's the Hawk!"
    Hawk was on a bench near the entrance, his saxophone case open in front of him with a few quarters in it, tossed there by passersby. He was wearing the same faded jeans, the same monster sneakers, and a torn shirt that said PROPERTY OF UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT across the front. There was a hole through ATHLETIC . He had sweat on his dark forehead; it trickled in streams down his face and glistened in his beard. The saxophone glistened in the afternoon sunlight, too, as his fingers slid from key to key. He was playing a song I'd never heard. When Tom plopped down in the grass beside the bench, Hawk winked without taking his mouth away from the sax, and he eased into the melody of "Hush, little baby don't say a word."
    I sat in the grass near Tom, took my sketch pad out, and began trying to do a drawing of Hawk. Hands are hard to draw. Hands moving on a saxophone are impossible.
    Tom Terrific sang.
    Two nuns walking on the path stopped, listened, consulted each other in whispers, and finally tossed a dollar bill into the saxophone case. They walked on, giggling.
    When the song ended, Hawk put his saxophone down carefully on the bench and wiped his face with a wrinkled handkerchief. "It's hot, man," he said. "Popsicle time. Popsicles on me today. You earned me a buck, Terrific."
    A shadow fell across my open sketch pad, and I turned. The same bag lady, in her black coat, was blotting out the sun as she stood there watching us.
    "Hawk," I said as quietly as I could, nodding toward the bag lady, "why don't you play one more before we get Popsicles? You have an audience, I think."
    He murmured, "Right." He picked up his instrument and started into what I recognized as