“It’s a baby carousel,” the father said, an uneasy note in his voice, as he urged the two young boys, both blonde, in their bright blue baseball uniforms with blocky white lettering, to ignore the whirling diversion and instead just have a walk around the perimeter of the park.  He kept his left hand inert, stiff as a catcher’s mitt, as the eldest child, no more than seven or eight, tried to enlace his smaller appendage with the man’s own.  They stopped at the fountain, the father standing with his hands on his pressed khaki hips, while the boys dipped, and splashed, and giggled at its edge.  Afterward I lost sight of them, but I was saddened by the thought that some neural pathway might have been routed, some joyous instinct reprogrammed, spurred by the urge to submit to authority and to like what the father liked, to dismiss what he dismissed, to heed the paternal dictate, so that from this afternoon on carousels, and the things that carousels represent,were already beginning to lose their magic.