He has worked in over twenty-eight very different professions. He has owned a dive shop and certified over 2,000 divers, worked in a steel mill, taught middle-school through college, helped thousands of people overcome problems that prevented them from finding employment, and has even worked at McDonalds. More recently, he got to know every employee at the Sonic in Grapevine by name, and he was invited to their employee Christmas party three years in a row, even though he definitely did not work there. But nothing is so impressive to me as the love his has for his wife, Naomi. They were married on April 8, 1957, and she passed away on April 14, 2009. Yesterday I found a poem that he wrote to her just a few months later.
Letter of Love
I'll see her again when they put me down beside her.
Tomorrow would not be too soon.
This world has nothing I want to see.
Tomorrow holds nothing that will replace her love for me.
I pray that she knows what I feel about her
And how glorious it will be
When together we cross over our Savior to see.
Father in Heaven help me as I go forth
Guide me each step 'till this world set me free.
Wait for me Yom, and I'll try to be deserving of you for eternity.
Dwight
September 11, 2009
When Dwight was working on his masters degree, he taught night school. A lot of great stories came from that point in his life, but here are a couple of my favorite.
On the first day of speech class, my grandpa met his new students. One was a six-foot-something, burly coal-miner. That coal-miner walked up to Dwight and told him that he would not under any circumstances ever get up in front of the class and talk. My grandpa retorted with a true-to-character "oh yes you will. You march up to the front of this classroom right now. Students, no one is to make a sound until I say." The miner sat in silence for five minutes until he couldn't any longer. He walked up to the front of the room and said, "here I am. Now what do you want?" My grandpa opened up a book and asked him to read a prepared passage. He did. The rest of the class was filled with a death glare from the miner in the back of the room. However, the next night the miner walked straight to the front of the room before he took his seat and repeated what he had said the day before. Dwight gave him a new passage to read, and for the following four months, there were absolutely no problems. At the conclusion of the class, my grandpa gave him a list of classes to take, and the miner went on to earn his associates degree. A while later, my grandpa called him up and said, "I have a job for you teaching in the technical college. Get down here!" The miner was interviewed, hired, and was still teaching nine years later when my grandpa left the college. In the words of Dwight: his whole life pivoted on that one night, the first day of class. But he got up, and he came. The rest of his life changed in that one moment. You can't be afraid. You can't let anyone take advantage of you or use you. You have to walk for yourself, and you never know where it will get you.
A different semester, he decided to try something new in his speech class. During the first week, he brought in a poster of a great white shark and held it up in front of the class. He said "this is my wife." The class burst out laughing, and for the following three or four weeks, Dwight continued to rail his wife, Naomi. He only said bad things about her, and he made it seem as if she was the very worst. One day, an older female student in his class had had enough. She said, "Professor Cotton, I can't take it anymore! You can't keep talking this way about your wife. What would she say if she heard you talk that way?" And my grandpa said, "I don't know. Why don't you ask her? She's sitting right beside you." And sure enough, Naomi had been sitting next to her since the first day of class. No one could stop laughing, and their joke was a huge success.
He also told me that he liked to say things that were obviously incorrect, just to get students to challenge him. He would say things, as if out of the book, that were completely false. Students started to challenge him, and eventually they figured out that he had been doing it on purpose, but they never stopped challenging him. Today he told me, "You know, people are just afraid sometimes." They might need a push, and that's what he gave them. He told me to stick up for myself, hold my own opinions, and that if I do that, I can do anything I want.
So I guess that is what I am sharing today: stand up for yourself because you never know where it might lead you, and it will always lead you somewhere better than where you were.
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