This is the story as told to me by an occasional commenter..

This guy at work is a secular Jew. Yet when he travels, wherever he goes, he tales along a pair of tefillin.

Why? He does not wear them when he is in Israel, nor does he don them when he is traveling. he simply takes them along. So why does he bother?

His father told him (a long time ago), that whenever he travels he should take his tefillin along. So he does.

On the one hand he is an idiot. On the other, at least he is thinking about his tefillin and he knows they have some sort of importance - the pintele yid, as we call it, keeps it in the front of his mind.