One tile in a vast mosaic.

I caught a Louisville Bats game last week with a close friend who I’ve known since kindergarten, and during the course of our nine-inning chat, names of people we haven’t seen in years were mentioned, going all the way back to our formative years in Georgetown.

It got me thinking about how very strange it sometimes feels to try and quantify elapsed time, which the history buff in me insists on doing even if the rewards are scant.

Thirty-five or more years ago, a collection of townspeople were part of my everyday existence, even if their presence usually was peripheral. Growing up in a small burg like Georgetown did not mean you necessarily knew every single person, but it meant that someone close to you did, and so you knew a little something about everyone. It was insular, to say the least.

This circle of acquaintances and hearsay began widening once we packed off to Floyd Central High School, and it has continued getting bigger ever since. These days, my world is far-flung, and we're all seemingly connected.

I have 1,700 friends on Facebook, although I truly “know” perhaps a quarter of them in any relevant, non-tangential sense. There are hundreds of others who regularly come into one or both of my businesses, and they, too, are mostly unknown to me on a close, personal basis.

Quite a few of them are far younger than me, placing them even further from the specific center of gravity in which we existed while growing up. At the time, this milieu seemed not very far removed from its immediate past. My father was a veteran of World War II, which were the formative years of his life, so naturally my own childhood reads like an extension of his early adulthood, far closer to 1945 than 1965.

Obviously, Georgetown residents of his generation or older all had lived through The War, whether as soldiers or homefront civilians – heavens, the senior citizens remembered World War I and Prohibition. When I was a kid, it had only been two decades since war’s end. By contrast, as a man, I’m accustomed to waiting twenty years for a new Van Halen album.

In 2012, it’s been 47 years since 1965, twice as long as those two decades, and it has been 67 years since the war itself ended. I still tend to think that things like this bear some measure of importance, but then again, I’m now chronologically older than my father and his contemporaries were during the time when looked up to them, literally and figuratively, as a child.

What brought all of this to the front of my lobes is a fellow named Bob Deirth, who died the other day at the age of 67. Bob wasn’t from Georgetown, but when I was young, he lived there, in a wood frame house right on the main drag. He had a wife and a couple of boys, worked at Bremner Biscuit (sic), and was a tremendous sports fan. Our paths crossed one summer when he was the part-time overseer of the baseball park, around which much of Georgetown’s social life revolved, and I was hired to be a temporary groundskeeper.

In retrospect, it was damned bucolic, and I got along just fine with Bob, a fellow I barely knew before then. Later that same year, a friend and I painted the exterior of Bob’s house. I can’t say we did a very good job of it, and the house needed more work than we were able to put into it, but he seemed satisfied.

I don’t recall seeing Bob again after 1985 or thereabouts, by which time my interests had shifted far, far away from my hometown even if my residence had not. Reading about his death, it amazes me to consider that when we first met, and I was an 18-year-old raking the infield, he was only 33 or perhaps 34 years of age. I could have sworn he was older than that, which probably says more about wacky youthful perceptions than anything else.

That’s about all I can tell you about Bob, so this doesn’t qualify as a very informative eulogy. That’s okay, because it wasn’t intended to be. His face and occasional acquaintance survive in my memory, and they will, alongside images and recollections of so many others like him, until I pass in the same direction as he.