Most anniversary pages in this country are written around a restaurant table, and in Carteret that page would be wrong. The borough has a working main street in Roosevelt Avenue and very little of the dining-room inventory a city of its density would normally carry, and it keeps almost no hotel rooms at all. So the anniversary dinner happens somewhere else: down Route 1 into Iselin and Woodbridge, over to Metuchen, up to Elizabeth, out to New Brunswick, or across the Arthur Kill onto Staten Island. What follows from that is a timing inversion worth taking seriously. If the flowers are meant to be part of the evening, they need to be standing in the house in the afternoon — before the couple showers, dresses and drives out — because a bouquet delivered to a restaurant twenty minutes after they sit down arrives into a room where nobody has anywhere to put it. Order it to the address, ask for an afternoon window, and let the evening be the evening. The arrangement is then waiting when they get back, which for a long marriage is frequently the better half of the gesture anyway.
The thing that distinguishes this borough's anniversary traffic is how long the marriages are and how long the addresses have been the same. Carteret is a stay-put place: families that came for the refineries, the terminals and the rail work a century ago are still on Pershing and Carteret Avenue, and a fair share of the orders on this page are twenty-fifth, fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries being delivered to a house somebody has held since the refineries were still hiring. Two practical things follow. First, the recipient is often home all day, which makes an afternoon window easy and makes a phoned-ahead delivery unnecessary — say in the notes that no advance call is wanted if the whole thing is meant to be a surprise. Second, put both names on the card. A milestone anniversary arrangement sent by a son, a daughter or a whole set of grandchildren should read as though it came from the family rather than from a system, and the shops here letter cards by hand. If you want the year named on it — the fifty-second, not just an anniversary — write it out; nobody will guess.
Then the address, which in Carteret is rarely as simple as one door. This is a borough of stacked houses, which means a street number frequently describes two or three separate front doors and a buzzer strip marked 1 and 2 if it is marked at all. Name the household and add a telephone number, or a fiftieth-anniversary arrangement goes to whoever happens to answer first — an error nobody notices until the evening is over. Out by the waterfront the failure runs the other way: the courts there open onto a shared yard, so the address points at one road while the door faces another, and the building name saves a driver ten minutes of circling. One seasonal caution, which matters more here than any mileage figure: nothing shelters these blocks from the channel, so between Thanksgiving and the end of March an arrangement left on a step is gone by the time anyone gets to it. Book the afternoon and have somebody there.