The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus shut down the other day, shut down for good, after a hundred-and-forty-six-year run, and this habitual old attendee can, perhaps, supply a farewell. My visits to the Greatest Show on Earth began about ninety years ago, when I was six or seven, and I can almost bring back my first awed awareness that the waiting three rings and two stage spaces, along with the overhead tangle of wires and trapezes and rigging, would all be busily occupied for the rest of the afternoon. The aroma was equally thrilling—a heady mix of sawdust, cotton candy, and animal dung. The opening parade inside Madison Square Garden was a blur of circling horses and waving performers, jugglers and acrobats and fat ladies, world-famous trapeze and high-wire artists in capes and tights, and tiara’d young women confidently astride the lofty necks of elephants. Shortly afterward came horn-tooting musical sea lions, and, yes, a vast population of clowns—clowns on stilts, clowns with flapping feet, tramp clowns and firefighting clowns, and a balloon-bellied clown trailing a hawser-sized leash attached to a tiny trotting dog in a pointed hat.

I was taken back to the show almost every year, and, in time, I returned with my own children. I can still recapture the terrifying high-wire Wallendas—a grim-faced family assemblage, with the muscular dads and uncles underneath, grasping horizontal balance poles and supporting an ascending multistory mansion of racks and chairs, with slimmer and younger family members precariously on top. High above the un-netted floor, they inched endlessly along and once again escaped death, to applause and letdown. I preferred the trapeze performers and slippered slack-wire dancers, and, perhaps best of all, the comfortably circling horseback acrobats, who kept their shoulders perfectly level while they stood at ease on the broad rumps of their steeds, and welcomed running and somersaulting male and female partners aboard the lolloping carrousel.

There were various finales over the years, but none better than that of Hugo Zacchini, the Human Cannonball, who waved to us before disappearing into the maw of a gigantic silvery cannon, and shortly reappeared—ka-boom!—from a cloud of flame and smoke, sailed the full length of the Garden, made a tuck, and landed gracefully on his back, in the Eighth Avenue-end netting. Time to head home and start thinking about next year.

In midlife, I caught a few travelling one-ring circuses in different parts of New England. These were family affairs, and what you loved about them was the moment when you recognized that the clown with the red rubber-ball nose had been the top-hatted ringmaster in the grand opener, and then one of the roustabouts tugging the trapeze rigging together for his spangled wife and daughter. You felt close to them by the end of the show, and missed them when, the next day, you drove past the small field or parking lot they had occupied and found them gone.

Somewhere back then, my family and I, driving north from Springfield, Mass, on I-91, looked idly over at the long truck we were passing and, within a half-opened door, saw two elephants placidly standing and munching in there, on their way to some upland gig.

Before this, in the latter nineteen-forties, a colleague of mine at Holiday told me that he had just interviewed a couple of old animal-act vaudevillians, travelling-circus types, a husband and wife now on the edge of retirement. Their act involved a pair of elephants that accompanied them to their small farm, in Tennessee, in the off-season. The woman said that, now and then, looking out the kitchen window, she would spy the two going through their act in an adjoining bit of pasture: spinning in opposite circles, sans prompting or music, and then raising their trunks and forelegs in unison, in a grand salute. The woman said this sometimes brought her to tears.

Olden days and sweet thoughts do not come naturally to me, and this long reach back to the Ringling Bros. is, perhaps, only an attempt to escape the greater shows on Earth that now envelop us. Low attendance and our recent knowledge of the deep cruelties of animal training have done away with the glitter of the circus. Larger losses impend. Elephants are disappearing in violent—and perhaps unstoppable—fashion, and so is their habitat, and our own. Elephants, at least, deserve better.