Birthday flowers in Aberdeen

Start with the address, because in Aberdeen the address lies. The township dropped the name Matawan in 1977 to stop being mistaken for the borough it wraps around on three sides, and the postal system never went along with it: a house on Lloyd Road or in Strathmore is addressed Matawan, NJ 07747, and the Cliffwood end of the township comes out as 07721. So when somebody gives you the recipient's address for a birthday delivery, it will very likely say a town the recipient does not live in, and that is fine — the shops on this bench read the ZIP and the street, not the town line, and 07747 is what the grid is built around. What matters far more is the second Aberdeen fact: the Aberdeen-Matawan station on NJ Transit's North Jersey Coast Line sits at the top of the township with a park-and-ride that fills before eight in the morning, and a large share of the adults you might be sending flowers to are in Manhattan, a bit over an hour away, from that hour until evening. A birthday order here is therefore not really a question about flowers. It is a question about where the person will be standing at two o'clock in the afternoon.

If the answer is a house, Aberdeen splits into three shapes and each one asks a different question of the driver. Strathmore, the Levitt tract laid out in the 1960s across the middle of the township, is street after street of the same handful of elevations with the number on the curb or the mailbox and not always on the house, so give the driver a colour, a car in the driveway or the corner it sits nearest rather than trusting the plate. Cliffwood and Cliffwood Beach on the 07721 end sit open to Raritan Bay, where you can see the Manhattan skyline across the water on a clear afternoon and where the wind that view comes with will move anything left unattended on a step — this is the stretch Sandy came through, and nothing about the exposure has changed since. And along the Route 35 and Lower Main Street side there are two- and three-family houses where one street number covers more than one household and the bell panel is marked with digits if it is marked at all. Name the household, upper, lower or rear, and leave a mobile number somebody will pick up. The train timetable then decides the rest: if the recipient is on the 6:52 back, a two o'clock delivery to an empty porch is a worse gift than a bouquet handed over at seven.

School birthdays run on their own rules here and they are stricter than people expect. Matawan Regional High School on Atlantic Avenue and Matawan-Aberdeen Middle School both take deliveries at a front desk, as do Strathmore, Cliffwood, Ravine Drive and Lloyd Road elementary schools, and none of them will carry flowers into a classroom mid-period; what happens is the arrangement waits in the office and the student collects it at the end of the day, which for a teenager is either the point or a mortification, so know which before you order. St. John Vianney High School in Holmdel works the same way. For a college birthday the radius reaches Brookdale Community College on Newman Springs Road in Lincroft and Monmouth University in West Long Branch at the outer edge, both of which mean a residence hall or a department office rather than a doorstep, and both of which want a building name on the order. For a teacher or a coach, the reliable version is delivery to the school before the last bell on a Friday, with the sender's name spelled out on the card — school offices will not guess at initials.