Homeless Like Me - Donald James Parker, Author

Homeless Like Me – Review by Martha A. Cheves, Author of Stir, Laugh, Repeat

“Whatever.  So since it’s not warm now, where are you sleeping?”  “Here at the mission.  Are you going to spend the night with us?”  Brian’s mouth fell open.  “Me?”  “Dude, if you’re going to write a book about being homeless, you can’t just put on the garb and expect the insight to magically appear in your head.  You have to live the life for a while.  This has to be an emotional experience so you can get the feeling into the book, not just the ideas.”  “But I …”  “Do you want to write a best seller, or do you want to dink around wasting your time and mine?”  “Well, of course I want to come up with a best seller, but I wasn’t planning to go into the bowels of Hell to do it.”  “Dude, you don’t know what Hell is.  Being homeless is only a purgatory, or maybe you could call it a near Hell experience.”  Brian surveyed the occupants of the room.  It was bad enough for him to share eating quarters with some of these people.  The thought of sleeping in the same room with them made his stomach churn.  Visions of having his scalp taken while he slumbered were impossible to shake off.  He bit down on his lower lip.  “Too much for you, ain’t it?  I should have known you didn’t have what it takes when I first ran into you.”

Brian Anderson is writing his first book.  He has decided to make it fiction about how it feels to be homeless and the best place to do his research is at the local shelter.  So he dons his “bum” clothes, parks his car several blocks away and walks in.  At least that was what he had planned but his plans are about to change when he has a knife stuck under his neck by shelter resident Zeke.  It takes a little talking but he finally convinces Zeke that he is an ok guy and plans no harm to him or any of the other shelter people.  Zeke, knowing what he does about living a life on the streets decides to become Brian’s body guard and even moves in with Brian to help him with his book.  But Zeke isn’t the only homeless person Brian ends up taking in, even though in reality he is about to become one of them himself.

As Brian meets the “shelter people,” gets to know them and hears their stories he finds himself getting even more excited about his book.  When he meets Miss Angel, a volunteer who helps serve meals, he decides she has the perfect name because she is truly an angel and the woman of his dreams.  But they have a three letter bridge named God between them.  Miss Angel is a Christian and Brian isn’t.  Now he has to find a way to bring her across the bridge to his side before she tries to drag him across to hers.

Homeless Like Me is a wonderful book of trust, friendship and love which brings people across the bridge into the land of God.  It has made me have second thoughts about some of the feelings I’ve had all my life regarding people and their personal ways of life.  It reminds us that through God, anything can happen and happen for the best.

209 pages

Sword of the Spirit Publishing

2009

ISBN# 978-0-578-03282-5