I stared at the green carbon copy of an office memo with an address hand-printed on it. RR2 Box 347…no city, no zip code. Was this address at the beginning of the Staunton part of my route or at the end of the Waynesboro part? At 4 o’clock in the morning I couldn’t exactly go knocking on doors, nor could I telephone saying, “Hi, I’m your newspaper carrier and I can’t find your house.”

Maybe there was a clue in the street address. Ahh. Here it was: New Hope Rd. But before I could get comfortable with this new information, doubt crept into my mind. Was it New Hope Rd or Old New Hope Rd? Or was it RT 254 or RT 612, both of which some folks called New Hope Rd? Are you with me or did I leave you somewhere around Box 347?

I tried to remember what the person at the circulation desk had told me.

“It’s the place with the black mailbox with gold numbering,” she said, adding, “You can’t miss the potted geraniums or spotted chrysanthemums…whatever.”

I looked about me. The roadside sported a row of fifteen black mailboxes and several of the visible porches had potted somethings on them. With 277 more papers to deliver, I didn’t have time to check out each porch.   Though the mailboxes each glittered with gold numbers, there was no way to tell which were the corresponding dwellings. (As it turned out, the route number and the street address never did match.)

So I bagged fifteen papers with post-its announcing myself as the new carrier on the block, and encouraging the recipients of this free edition to start every day with our paper in hand. I dropped a note in the mail asking her to call me so that we could get it all straight. Three days later we were having coffee and inspecting her chrysanthemums.   I gave her an armload of papers and a gleaming new tube decorated with our company logo…and an orange reflector dot on it, so the next carrier couldn’t miss it in the dark.

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