by Hobie Morris
It is the first peacetime American Christmas in nearly four years. The contagious Christmas Eve excitement surges like a powerful electric current through the thousands of hourly commuters fleeing in all directions through New York City’s massive Grand Central Railroad Station.
A tall Army officer carrying a heavy duffle bag on his shoulder slowly limps through the milling and pushing crowd. He sits down on the temporary wartime wooden bench. Lt. John Barton is just home by troop ship from Europe. He nervously looks up at the huge overhead oval clock.
It is almost 7 p.m. Would she come? He keeps watching for a sign they had agreed on.
Strange things often totally unexplainable sometimes happen to people. What follows is a special story that happens at Christmas time during WW II. Sadly the special people in this story have passed on, but their ripples continue.
It is early December 1944. Twenty-one-year-old Army Lt. John Barton, a handsome, broad-shouldered native Utican, is home on a short furlough. During his furlough, he enjoys the many holiday festivities and excitement in downtown Utica. Despite wartime austerity and rationing, Utica is brilliantly aglow with colorful Christmas lights. Familiar music serenading the thousands of shoppers in the stores. Smiling Utica policemen, along with Boy Scouts with long poles, help the packed crowds to safely cross the many busy intersections.
John enjoys visiting a popular a bookstore at the corner of Court Street and Genesee. It has a small section containing used books. One snowy afternoon while browsing he happens to pick up a small, blue covered book of verses. Each page contains carefully penned comments in the page’s margin. John thought the hand-written comments were unusually thoughtful. Written in the fly leaf in the same handwriting is a name, street but no city. A store clerk pulls out a large ledger where records are kept. Incredibly, and for no apparent reason, he discovers that the city had been written down. The mysterious writer is a Colleen Jones, who lives in New York City. John buys the book and leaves.
For reasons that in no way could he explain, he decides in a few days to send this Colleen Jones a note. It’s a brief thanks, and he tells her a little bit about himself, that he’ll soon be going overseas, and would she like to write him some time?
A week later John, once again in uniform, is on a New York Central train heading downstate to New York City. His camouflaged troop ship is part of a large, well-protected convoy, heading into the frigid, always stormy North Atlantic. Barton was part of a huge number of American troops being rushed to Europe to help blunt Germany’s final massive offensive of the war.
Casualties were tremendous on both sides. During the Battle of the Bulge, he’s wounded three times by shrapnel—in both legs and his left arm. But he is soon back in combat.
Colleen Jones did write. Many letters cross the Atlantic both ways in the next 10 months or so. Deeper and deeper their hearts began to touch. From a foxhole on the dangerous German border, with dirty and bloody hands and a pencil stub, John scribbles a P. S. to Colleen: “Please send me a photo, so I can carry it in my helmet liner.” Her reply on every occasion is the same.
Her reply on every occasion is the same. If he really liked her, what she looked like didn’t matter. But John still only knew her by her letters.
In his last letter to Colleen, before shipping home, John asked her to meet him in the lobby of Grand Central Station on a day and time. Her hasty reply said she would and he would know her by the large, single, red Christmas rose pinned on her coat.
It is time: 7 p.m. His eyes anxiously watch. A beautiful, blonde young woman stops in front of him. With a smile on her face, she says mirthfully, “Hi, Soldier, going my way?” John was momentarily mesmerized by her beauty and luminous, sky blue eyes. He has never seen skin that looked like white marble. She wore a green coat, but there is no red rose.
Then John saw her behind the stunning blonde. She wore a red rose on her plain, threadbare coat. She is in her late 40s, gray hair showed around her ears under her wool hat. The blonde is quickly walking away out the side door. John wants to follow her so badly, but before him in the old coat is the woman who won his heart and he hers.
The woman wearing the red rose has a pale, deeply lined full face. Something is very kindly about her face, especially a warm smile and twinkling gray eyes. John stands and approaches her. With his hand out holding the blue covered book of verses that was to be his identification to Colleen.
The lady wearing the red rose smiles at John. (Heartbroken, John knows this can’t be the love he had dreamed of so long. But it might be even more precious. A special friendship that God in His mysterious way planned for him.)
John raises his right hand in salute and says to her ,“Hello, I’m John Barton and you must be Colleen Jones. So very happy to meet you at last. Would like to go with me to have dinner?”
“Why, son,” the elderly lady says “I don’t know what this is all about. All I know, a few minutes ago, when I was walking through the station, a pretty blonde girl wearing a green coat, asked me if I would wear this red rose on my coat. She said if you should ask me out to dinner, she’ll be waiting for you in the restaurant across the street. She told me it was ‘some kind of a test.’”
Colleen Jones’ incredibly insightful wisdom is that the true nature of one’s heart is its response to the unattractive. As Houssage has written, “tell me who you love and I will tell you who you are.”
Isn’t this the true Christmas message?
Lt. John Barton takes the red rose in his hand, Colleen Jones is waiting.
Hobie Morris of Brookfield is a simple country man.