One of the best stories told at my stepfather's memorial service was the one about the sulfuric acid. See, this shipment of sulfuric acid arrived at Andrew's chemical company, and it was diluted to the wrong concentration, and, well, it helps to be an engineer to really appreciate the ensuing hijinks.

But that's not why I liked the story. I liked it because the guy telling it liked it so much that decades after it happened, this was his memory of Andrew, the one he chose to share with a room full of friends and family, the one about a competent engineer working through a problem. And that was a big part of who Andrew was, and how he saw himself, and although the story lacked the emotional oomph of, say, the grandchildren's recollections that we also heard that afternoon, it was a meaningful fragment, a hint at the whole person we were gathered to remember.

Many Andrews were recalled along with the engineer and the grandfather when we convened earlier this month to eulogize him, days after he lost his fight with Lou Gehrig's disease. We heard about bachelor Andrew and Andrew the athlete -- the time he forgot his tennis shoes and played a match barefoot instead of forfeiting -- Andrew the flinty businessman, the husband, the widower, the man rejuvenated by his happy second marriage. We were given glimpses of him through the prisms of familial love, long friendship, and shared accomplishment, and when it was done I knew him better than I had before.

It's curious, what we know and what we think we know about other people, what matters to us about them, what we take with us when they are gone. Every portrait in our mind's eye of a real person is a collage, the elements of which we focus and project upon according to our own experiences, preferences, and needs.

Who, for example, was Kay Edwards? When she died in early June, the newspaper reported that she had been a philanthropist, a Bryan of the Greensboro Bryans, thank you very much, which was all true, and important. But I remember her first as my friend's mom -- your friends' mothers actually have pretty good-sized supporting roles in the screenplay of your childhood -- and then when we became friends ourselves, as a doyenne, a wit, and a keeper of confidences, and those are the things of hers that I will pack away, leaving others to consider her larger significance.

Another June funeral, this one highly public, another example of the kaleidoscope of memory: Ronald Reagan's death showed that people can't even agree on the meaning of well-documented recent events. The idea that people and presidencies are complicated was quickly lost in the jockeying over his legacy, and Reagan (along with eight years of American history) was reduced to a fairly meaningless yes-or-no question. The man himself was largely an afterthought.

We started the summer at yet another memorial service, this one at my 20th college reunion, a tree-planting in honor of a classmate, Calvin Gooding, who was killed in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Before the ceremony, a good friend of Calvin's told me that he was worried about Cal's posthumous reputation, which, given the circumstances of his death and the very real good qualities of the man, was headed in the perilous direction of sainthood.

We thought our friend deserved better, that he ought to be remembered as a man of parts and a man in full. He needed to be recognized for his particulars. Fortunately, the recollections around the red oak sapling that afternoon were irreverent and real enough to forestall his canonization for quite some time. When his friends were done, Calvin's father stepped forward and spoke about his son in public for the first time since his death. Those stories seemed to reach him in a way that generic encomiums never could.

There are two versions of the same old saying: Both God and the devil are said to be in the details. That's why the details are worth remembering.

Edward Cone (www.edcone. com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.