Glen Tate - 299 Days - The Preparation

Cole got better and better. By his later years of elementary school, he could string sentences together. It was still very hard for him to understand people he wasn’t used to. People like his family had gotten used to how to talk to him, but others didn’t know.

Manda took amazingly good care of her little brother. She spent a lot of her free time helping him talk and asking him questions to get him to talk. It was heartwarming. Cole came to depend on his big sister. When she was gone, Cole would ask, “Where is Sissy?” He could handle her being gone, but he was much more comfortable with her around.

Grant had a nontraditional father/son relationship with Cole.

They were very close and Grant spent all the time he could with Cole. But not being able to communicate well put a crimp in the formation of the relationship. Grant learned that hanging out with Cole meant just being in the same room with him; it didn’t mean talking. Cole got more and more comfortable with Grant just being there and not trying to talk to him all the time. Once the comfort was there, then Cole would let Grant talk to him.

Even when Cole was in middle school, Grant felt like he had a young boy instead of a middle school student. Grant would notice other dads talking to their sons like Grant talked to Cole, and then realize that the other boys were three or four years old. It was very hard on Grant. He loved Cole, and Cole was doing so much better than a kid with a full case of autism, but Grant still struggled.

Cole was on a little league team. They gave him a few breaks like pitching him soft balls. At first he didn’t get the part about running to first base but once someone showed him, he did fine. He even hit a homerun one time and ran the bases. He would be OK. Different, but OK.

Cole’s autism had a big effect on Grant. He realized that the “perfect” suburban life—a nice house, lots of stuff, vacations—wasn’t so perfect. Family was what mattered. Grant felt this urge to disregard the expectations of being a “normal” suburban family and became fixated on ensuring that his family could make it through whatever bad things came their way. Grant was the man in the family, and this was what men did. He started working more reasonable hours and stopped letting his mind be occupied with how to climb the résumé ladder.

Grant became a Christian. One night he just said, “God, I can’t do this on my own. I need You.” Right as he said that, he had the overpowering sensation that everything would ultimately be alright, but after lots of misery and sacrifice. It was more than just optimism; it was a certainty that amazing things were ahead of him. It was the path again: He couldn’t see into the future, but he knew—with absolute certainty—the general direction things would go. He started to see that people put into his life would be part of the coming amazing things and that he and they had been placed in this place at this time for a reason. He didn’t want people to think he was crazy so he didn’t talk about it. He essentially became a secret Christian.

During this time, Grant kept thinking about how he was the man and it was his job to get his family through whatever came in the future. He thought about how dependent they were on society. They relied on many other people for things like food, fixing things, personal protection. These were all the things that he used to know how to do in Forks but had lost. It was just a little thought at this point. He didn’t actually do anything to act on the little thought. But he thought it. Over and over again. It was like someone was trying to tell him something.

Grant’s work at WAB was going great, but it was coming at price. The part he loved the most was working for WAB to help its members who were getting screwed by government. It was extremely satisfying to have people like Big Sam break down in tears of gratitude. Grant thrived on that.

There was a price to it, though. Grant fought people all day, every day. Suing the government is not easy. They fight dirty. They would constantly pull tricks and underhanded stunts. They would lie and Grant would lose cases where his client was right but unwilling to lie to counter their lies. The bureaucrats on the other side would try to set Grant up. They filed a complaint against him with the Bar Association, which had the power to take away his law license. He was completely innocent, so he won, but it was incredibly stressful. This stress began taking its toll. His blood pressure was starting to go up.

He would come home from work—the “fist fight” as he called it—and would snap at his wife and kids. He would apologize but he couldn’t just go from a fight to the calm of his home in an instant.

One time, Grant was driving home after a junior government attorney he was winning against had falsely accused him of trying to physically threaten her. Even as he was nearing his house, he was still frothing mad that this lawyer would accuse him of that and that she might call the police and then he’d have to prove his innocence. Grant pulled in the driveway and hit the garage door button. He knew that when he hit that button he had to put all the anger and fighting away. He owed that to Lisa; it wasn’t fair for him to come home and be furious for hours. But, Grant couldn’t stand it. Someone had falsely accused him of a crime. Yet he had to just be calm and tell his wife he had a good day at the office. Grant stopped in the driveway. He just stopped.

Then it hit him. He was a fighter. Grant fought people all day long. Not with guns or fists, but with law and politics. But it was fighting just the same. He was learning how to fight; how to not fear his opponent, and how to channel the anger into an advantage while controlling his outward emotions. Grant didn’t want to fight, but he was always found himself in a position where he had to do so to help innocent people. He realized that ever since he punched his dad in the face that he had been placed on a path of fighting and winning. He felt like these obstacles were being placed in front of him to teach him how to fight.

You are being taught to fight. You will need this fighting spirit even more for what’s next.

What was that? It was like an outside thought, as if someone was talking to him, but not with words he could hear. It was… an outside thought. But it was loud and clear.

Grant was stunned. He just sat in the driveway for a while. Did that just happen? Was an outside thought talking to him? That was crazy. But there was no mistaking it. An outside thought had spoken to him.

The kids came out of the house because they heard the garage door go up but hadn’t seen their dad come in. As they were coming up to him, Grant was in a trance realizing that all these fights he was forced to take on had a bigger purpose. The outside thought had said so. It was crystal clear.

Grant rebelled. He didn’t want to listen to the outside thought.

He screamed at the steering wheel, “I don’t want to fight! I want to be normal. Why do I have to do this?”

The windows were up so the kids didn’t hear him. He snapped out of the trance and saw his two fabulous kids. They were so happy to see him; smiling and waving. How could he be in a bad mood when they were so happy to see him?

A few days later, back at the office, Grant got a call from a WAB member named Ed Oleo. His case was unusually egregious but it illustrated what was going on in the larger sense of things.

Ed was a real estate agent who owned a small real estate agency. He was a nice guy. He caught the head of the Board of Real Estate Licensing, a corrupt man named Bart Sellarman, underdisciplining an agent for a large real estate agency. The underdisciplined realtor had stolen almost a million dollars from clients but, because he had connections, got a $1,000 fine. Ed was outraged and started talking to other real estate agents about how Sellarman was giving sweetheart deals to some realtors. Word got back to Sellarman that Ed was accusing him of corruption.