You’ll Always Know Where to Find Me

“Paint your dress, ma’am?”

At 8:30 on a Saturday morning, as I stood at my front door wearing my bathrobe and slippers, this hardly sounded like a fun idea.

Besides, who was this pimply faced teen-ager at my house, anyway? And what kind of weirdo goes around asking women who just crawled out of bed and still look like Medusa if they want their dress painted?

Was this some kind of kinky new trend I’d never heard of?

I looked him straight in the eye.

“Believe me, you wouldn’t know where to begin,” I said in my best Lauren Bacall voice.

The teen-ager looked puzzled.

“Oh sure I would,” he answered cheerfully. “Just right out there at your curb.”

“My curb?” I asked. “You actually do this kind of thing in public?”

He cocked his head to the side and knitted his brows in a classic look of perplexity.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “See, for a donation of $7 . . . “

“A donation! You actually expect me to give you a donation for this?”

“Look, if you don’t want it, that’s OK,” he said. “We’re just going from house to house painting addresses in white numbers on the curb strip.”

“You want to paint my address ,” I said, finally understanding.

The teen-ager just stared at me.

A nut case, he must have been thinking.

After that, I didn’t mind paying him the $7. It made him go away. Certainly a lot faster than some of those tenacious little door-to-door pitch-kids for candy and cookies.

Some of those are straight out of the Whatsamatta U. School of Business.

“What’s the matter, don’t you want some cookies?”

“We’re all diabetics here.”

“What’s the matter, don’t you want to help my son sell the most candy in his class?”

Yeah, right.

On the other hand, it occurred to me later, with cookies you have a lot more to show for your money. The five extra pounds on your hips, for instance.

But who cares whether I have a newly painted address on my curb?

Hadn’t I, in essence, just thrown my money away?

I didn’t get the answer until several days later as I headed into Thousand Oaks after work.

*

It was a dark and stormy night. . . .

Actually, it wasn’t stormy, but it certainly was dark when I exited the freeway, driving toward an address in the 1600 block of a major street.

Somewhere was a meeting that sounded interesting enough for me to hire a baby-sitter and attend, even after a long day.

But for the life of me, I had no idea where I was.

I drove slowly, peering up and down the buildings for a street number. Nothing.

I doubled back after I reached the end of the street, certain I must have been looking in the wrong place. Still nothing.

Plenty of building names, to be sure--the Joe Blow Building, the Joe Blow Center--but no numbers.

And not a single one on the curb, for miles. Was this some new kind of design chic?

Finally, I gave up. I had no more patience. I turned my car around and nosed toward home.

Then, en route, the thought struck me: What if I didn’t have that option? What if I had to get where I was going? What if I’d been driving an ambulance or firetruck?

“Occasionally we get instances where it’s a problem,” said Barbara Brodfuehrer, ambulance coordinator for Ventura County Emergency Medical Services.

“But it’s not something we can tell cities they have to do.”

Actually, Fire Marshal Doug Carriger said there is a countywide code regarding addresses. Although there’s no requirement for curbside numbers, he said, the address does have to be clearly visible from the street, the color must contrast with the color of the residence or building and, in Ventura, the numbers must be at least four inches high.

“As a matter of reality, though, I don’t believe any governmental agency drives by and makes sure the homeowners maintain numbers on their houses,” he said.

If the lack of numbers was seriously hampering emergency response, things might be different. But Nicolas Ridout, operations manager for Pruner Health Services, one of the three ambulance companies in the county, said there’s a reason emergency vehicles don’t encounter more problems with missing or hidden street numbers.

“We run into the same thing as anyone else in terms of trying to find an address,” he said. “The only difference is, we have searchlights so we can look around porches and things like that for house numbers. A few places still have the numbers on the mailboxes.”

Thanks to that teen-ager, though, not at my house. Now anyone who wants to visit me can find me easily.

I’m the one with a painted ‘dress.