On Saturday morning, my wife Roberta and I attended a memorial service for one of our friend’s dad.

To say I enjoyed it would be a stretch for obvious reasons, but as much as one can derive pleasure from such an occasion, I did, because it was very well done on a number of fronts. There was nice music, a fantastic slide show, and a very good opening speaker, a friend of the decedent.

The fellow’s voice bore something of a resemblance to that of the late Bob Sheppard, the longtime Yankee Stadium PA announcer who himself recently died, at age 99; with very little effort, I could imagine the man saying “Now batting, No. 7, Mickey Mantle. No. 7.”

Part of the guy’s talk involved recounting a story of a college professor, a man who had been a boy in wartime, Nazi-occupied Greece. The story, which I appreciated immensely, went something like this:

The professor ended every lecture by asking, “Are there any questions?” And most of the time, as the students were eager to get on to someplace else, there were not. But one day, a young man raised his hand and said, “I have a question: What is the meaning of life.”

The professor reached into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of glass, no bigger than a quarter, and told how it came to be in his possession. When he was a boy, he said, he had come upon a crashed German motorcycle, and he picked up the biggest piece of broken mirror that he could find.

He took it home, polished off the sharp edges by rubbing in on stone and concrete, and carried it with him always, as something of a talisman whose significance he didn’t realize till later. And he shared that significance with the student who asked about the meaning of life.

He held up that piece of glass such that it caught and reflected light to the darkest part of the lecture hall.

“That’s the meaning of life,” he told the student. “Living in such a way that you can direct light to places, to people, that otherwise would be left in the darkness.”