Bill Keaggy - Milk Eggs Vodka: Grocery Lists Lost and Found

Hed write something down on a scrap of paper and would never look at it again. For him, the physical act of writing was enough to elevate the note to a more permanent status in his mind. Hed say, Im not writing this down to remember it later, Im writing it down to remember it now. The authors of the grocery lists in this collection certainly needed to remember something now. The importance of the lists themselves however, is something less than permanent, as evidenced by the fact that thousands of them have been casually discarded for Bill Keaggy and his colleagues to scoop up and collect. Lucky for us.

Ive been watching Bill from afar as both his collection and his obsession have grown. What strikes me as most important about these lists is not really the people who wrote them, or whats on them, or even the people who found them. What is interesting to me is how, upon seeing a list for the first time, we immediately start to imagine the story behind it. Its like joining a movie halfway through. We cant help but start to piece together a narrative from these barest of outlines, imagining what happened before the list was made and more frequently, what happened after the shopping was complete. As I made my way through this book for the first time, I felt as if I were reading a highly compact anthology of short stories.

Most of the time we write grocery lists to and for ourselves. Theyre highly personal that way, more like diaries than like postcards. Theyre meant for our own eyes only and theyre written in a shorthand that mimics the way we think. (And for some of these lists, thats a pretty scary thought.) As objects theyre interesting too, and a fairly sad commentary on the state of American penmanship. But more than anything else, its the collecting of all of them all in one place thats the most fun. The wise-cracking marginalia guides us through, and each page brings us something unexpected, and more often than not, a laugh.

Now what was that other thing I was going to say about Bills book? Hmm. Perhaps I should have made a list. Enjoy. Jim Coudal Coudal.com