Benjamin Franklin, I believe it was, had a saying – actually, he had many – that went something like "take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves."

My understanding of that was always that as we move through life we ought to be busying ourselves with lots of little things and that if we did then we’d find the bigger things would sort of fall into place because we’d done the smaller ones, no matter how small.

I thought of that advice all over again over the past few days with the passing of Bertis Moore. I’m among the many folks who referred to him as "Mr. Bertis" but that title had nothing to do with him being "Mister" in the sense that he thought himself better than most folks or was aloof or unapproachable. In fact, my experience with him, which goes back some 40 years or so was anything but.

I don’t remember when I first met him. His family – his own immediate with his wife, who was always "Miss Louise," and the one with his brothers and sisters and parents and so on – was well established in the Bear Creek and Bonlee communities where I had come to spend considerable time for an obvious reason. My better half, who wasn’t that at the time, introduced me to them all as we went along.

It was in the late 1970’s and early ‘80’s that I really got acquainted with Mr. Bertis and it was through what was to him, I think, a little thing or two but which turned out to be a really big one for me.

That was the time when I was having my own Moses and the burning bush experience. Trying to figure out the logic of giving up my professional career to enter the ministry and go to seminary was something that was a struggle for me. And frankly part of the struggle revolved around how was I going to help support my family which by then had grown to include not only me and my now better half but also the two thirty-somethings who were not even at that time the two teenagers who used to live at my house.

The only thing I was absolutely sure of was that I had this compulsion within – "fire in the bones" is how the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah described it – and a very real personal beginning of having faith in the Boss.

It was at this particular time that I got several things – an expression of how things work out in time when we exercise faith and of how the Boss uses us as His assistants to do that.

I don’t remember how it all came about but Mr. Bertis, somehow knowing I could use a few bucks, offered me a job . . . actually two jobs at the same time. During the day, he put me to work with the crowd he had that got up hay for his growing cattle operation. Those were the days before round bales and machinery did most of the work, days when teenage boys – and men in graduate school – were glad to have the work. It meant walking along the rows of bales in the fields and chunking them onto the trailer to be stacked and then unloading and stacking the same at the barn.

Back then I still had both shoulders Mother Nature had given me, shoulders that now have been readjusted by the surgeon and his blade, and enough strength to handle the task. There was a lot of that to do because there were lots of cows and they ate lots of hay.

The second job he gave me also had something to do with eating – this time by people. Mr. Bertis and his family were in the restaurant business and business was good. I’ve never been the best cook in the world – peanut butter sandwiches and Cheerios are high on the list of my dishes – but I had enough sense to know how to scrape plates and run a dishwasher and so I did.

I got acquainted with lots of plates and lots of utensils then. Most of them made several trips through my little room before we called it a night. It wasn’t that big a place but, jut as in real estate, location was a good thing. I stood about 10 steps from some of the kitchen ovens from which Bertis, his wife, his mama-in-law and his daughter continually pulled fresh hot biscuits and piles of puddings and pies.

There’s nothing in the world any better than a just-out-of-the-oven hot biscuit with a thick slice of tomato and a slab of butter . . . except for a second biscuit. I ate my share of those all along, along with banana pudding and so forth, while I was working and ate again at the end of the night when we all sat down, owners and workers alike, to eat, visit and talk.

Mr. Bertis was always interested in how my school and studies were going and encouraged me all along. It was particularly encouraging when, right before going out the door on Saturday night to head home, he’d load me up with left-over pans of fried chicken, country style steak and gravy, biscuits and vegetables and such. My little brood would eat on that for half a week. He paid me twice – with cash and with chow . . . and actually three times with his interest in me.

I can’t remember how long I worked for him. Eventually while still in school I went to serve a small rural church in south central Virginia where if it snowed anywhere it snowed there. But I never forgot his little things to me.

A previous commitment involving some other folks did not allow me to attend his funeral service the other day but through the years I did a little thing of my own with him. We often ate at his family’s restaurant and I never went through the line the first, second or any other time without thanking him when I saw him.

"Oh, that was nothing," he’d say. "You helped me more than I helped you."

I don’t know about all that but I do know I’m glad he helped me and that I helped him and that telling him how much I appreciated him and his family and their kindness to me was a little thing I didn’t overlook.