When I think of my Uncle Jim, I often remember him as Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Jim Mathews, who died earlier this summer at age 77, loved to perform in community theater productions near his home in San Mateo. He sang in many shows and took on many roles, but his signature was playing the former president in the musical Annie, that classic Depression story about an orphan girl taken in by a rich capitalist, Daddy Warbucks.

Late in the show, Annie and Daddy Warbucks go to the White House, where FDR is considering a new program of social supports for struggling Americans. “I want to feed them and house them and pay them. Not much, but enough to send home to their parents,” Jim, as the president, would declare.

Through the song “Tomorrow,” Annie convinces FDR to go forward with this New Deal. Then, in the best moment of Jim’s performance, he would rise and start a solo.

When I’m stuck with a day

That’s gray, and lonely.

 I just stick out my chin and grin, and say…

Then he’d pause, turn to the audience and add, “Now sing with me! Republicans too!”

I share this memory with you now because so many of us are stuck in gray days. There’s an epidemic of loneliness, even here in friendly, bright California. The world’s awfulness often stops us in our tracks.

Jim had more than his share of gray days. He was injured at birth, and his parents (my grandparents) were told he never would walk (he did, with a pronounced prancing style, after a lot of therapy). He never married or had children (though his niece and two nephews, including me, treasured him as a quasi-parental figure). He never achieved any particular renown (though I’m trying with this column).

Far too often in the Golden State, and especially in Silicon Valley, where Jim spent almost all his life, the conventional wisdom is that you need a big and well-known technology, with venture funding and a giant brain, to shape the future. Jim’s example puts the lie to that thinking. He had a wonderful life, in a Frank-Capraesque way. Because he understood that life and technology, a subject he made a career teaching, are built out of small things. So are better tomorrows.

James Mathews was born in 1946 in Long Beach, one of Southern California’s bigger cities. His parents—a civilian U.S. Navy employee and a teacher—moved him to San Mateo when he was in elementary school.

San Mateo is a smaller city, of 100,000, but whenever I visited him there—which was often—he made the place seem grand. Wherever you went with him became enchanted. The little train and the big trees in Central Park. The playgrounds and fields at Hillsdale High and Laurel Elementary. The little branch libraries. His beloved College Heights Church, a highly democratic and informal place where almost every member of the congregation, adult and child, would talk during the service.

The church sat atop a windswept hill, with bay views so glorious that I sometimes wondered: Who needs heaven?

Jim’s magic was that he paid attention to little things. “Don’t step on those—they’re California poppies,” he once advised. “Those are the state flower!” And he engaged with everyone, even people who were scary. At Hillsdale High, Jim was no jock, and the 25-year-old football coach had intimidating intensity.  But instead of backing away, Jim volunteered to be the team manager and learned lasting lessons about teamwork from that coach, the future Super Bowl winner Dick Vermeil.

If you thought like Jim, everything seemed like an opportunity. Jim, who graduated from San Francisco State, eventually got a low-profile job at the College of San Mateo, a community college. Over 21 years, he and his colleagues found ways to add the best new computers and technology, ultimately creating a dynamic media lab. From there, he went to Baywood Elementary, where he created not one but two tech labs. He designed them to teach not just students, but teachers and parents. Jim insisted that students fix the computers themselves.

“Grandpa Geek,” they called him.

Technology, Jim would say, was not this big force to be feared or celebrated. Technology was really just a lot of little things, and the fun was to be had in tinkering, and figuring out how to use them together.

Speaking of fun, the most fun I ever had in my life was when Uncle Jim would visit Southern California and take my brother and me to Disneyland. I’d gone to Disneyland with other relatives, but it was boring—you’d wait in long lines for the biggest rides. But Jim took us to everything and emphasized the little treasures: the Enchanted Tiki Room, the rock formations on Tom Sawyer Island, the real-world potential of the automated People Mover in Tomorrowland, which he considered the best land. (He was right about the People Mover—they are installing a new one at LAX now.)

The little things that mattered most to Jim were charity. He looked for ways to help. He donated to the people at the door. And to the people who called on the phone. I once asked Jim if he was a soft touch. His answer: What’s wrong with being a soft touch?

Jim didn’t like it when people tried to take care of him, but he loved to help take care of other people.

Eight years ago, Jim, feeling a bit lonely after retiring and moving back into his deceased parents’ home, heard at church about a woman and her two young sons who were unhoused and needed a place to stay. He invited them to move in with him. They stayed for five years. He didn’t see it as an act of generosity. He was benefiting from this “house sharing,” from the companionship and help of his roommates.

Once, when I had dinner with all of them, Jim said he felt like a fool—for not having shared his home with people in similar circumstances many years earlier.

But Jim didn’t dwell on regrets. He was determined not to get bogged down with today’s problems. Because a new opportunity to help someone else will always present itself. And soon. Maybe even tomorrow, which is only a day away.