I know nothing at all about Kevin Randazzo, except that, three summers ago, he was 18 years old and had a job taking tickets and helping children onto the wooden horses at Nunley’s Carousel and Amusements in Baldwin, Long Island, and that, when, at the end of the 1995 season, the owners felt it was time to sell the merry-go-round, he said this to a New York Times reporter: “So many lives have been on here. The only consolation I can think of is if, like, everything lasted forever, it would have no value. If it never came to an end, I guess it wouldn’t mean so much.”

This seems to me succinct and beautiful, and, of course, true. We do value things in their passing; often, indeed, we don’t understand what something meant to us until it’s gone. Fifteen years ago, I saw the Rocky Springs Amusement Park in Lancaster, Pennsylvania auctioned off. Everything went in a weekend - arcade games, kitchen equipment, Skee-Ball alleys, the Dodgem and the Whip, the Cuddle-Up and the carousel, and a rollerskating rink. The auctioneers walked from ride to ride, accompanied by a small knot of would-be buyers, while hundreds of people who had no interest whatever in acquiring the furnishings of a fun house wandered around the park. They had come to bid it goodbye, and most of them seemed subdued, as if they’d only just realized what a part it had played in their lives. “This is beautiful,” I overheard a middle-aged man say to his wife as they passed by under the tall old trees. “Why’d we stop coming here?”

Sooner or later, most of them seemed to be drawn to the Wild-Cat roller coaster and stood there staring up into its high scaffolding, smiling and shaking their heads and remembering that first drop. It was no surprise to me to see them congregating around the narrow platform. After all, a roller coaster is the Gibraltar of any amusement park, always the most memorable ride and, no matter how much baroque gorgeousness may be lavished on the carousel, the best-looking. And, unlike other amusement-park rides with their punishing centrifugality, roller coasters have a narrative. Or so it seems to me. I like amusement parks and have been to a lot of them, many a long time ago now. But the coaster rides remain firm in my memory, whether clattering through the treetops in little Waldameer Park in Erie, Pennsylvania or surging into the Flying Turns at the noble, vanished Euclid Beach Park in Cleveland, Ohio, a ride put up by the Philadelphia Toboggan Company that precipitated the train off its tracks and into a great wooden corkscrew so superbly carpentered that you might have been rushing through the hull of Donald Mackay’s Flying Cloud. I don’t have quite the necessary dedication to the creatures to get married aboard one, as did David Lindsay, the author of the story on roller coasters in