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Regarding The Grocery Lists Of Others
Avery Gregurich
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L*STS: an Essay Daily Happening | About & Contents
Lists | Lasts | Losts | Lusts | Lests | Other
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“We enter such
brilliance as we entered
the world, without
shopping list, perfectly.”
Denis Johnson, “The Supermarkets of Los Angeles”
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No it is not joy and it is not pride and is not relief that I am feeling now as I sit cross-legged on the carpet in the attic and leaf through a reusable shopping bag full of other people’s grocery lists.
I am here sorting the lists by size and paper type, color, legibility, and lastly, by their contents. There's about twelve and half years of found or stolen scraps and little notes and photographs and other written ephemera collected during my shifts at the grocery store. I've moved this bag several times across Iowa without a proper design for why. I take them out once or twice a year, each time turning them over in my hands, sorting them, thinking of doing something with them, giving up and eventually putting them back down into the bag and returning it to hang from a hook in the attic. I am careful with the lists. Some are written in pencil and I try not to smudge the graphite with my thumbs.
Ridiculous, this life and all the possible others.
I arrange them on the scanner and compare the various effects of their layouts, deciding how to best display them. I am trying to make images capable of sparking some explanation suitable to both of us as to why I’ve collected and kept them and continued on thinking about them over the years.
Do you also recognize in the lists your own repetitions and patterns? What you eat and how you write. What your life and diet look like. In language. Part of why I keep them is because I am soothed by them. Or at least by this act of collecting them. Cataloging them. Preserving them. For who? You?
What is the grocery list if not a kind of half-assed hex spooled out against the tide, a brazen plea for manifestation? By limiting the absolute possibility that the modern grocery store allows, the list creates a uniform reality, bridging the present with the only future still worth planning a meal for: the immediate one. I imagine that the grocery list is about the only time most people still write by hand with only themselves as intended audience.
I am most drawn to the lists because of these deep intimacies, preserving how we each talk to ourselves in these individual languages. How this might look to a stranger. The way we write so that we will remember exactly what we believed we needed when we set it down in ink and shoved off again into the lancing void.
The list represents a specific time before, spent somewhere else, and after asking others or most often simply by ourselves to actually think about what it is that we absolutely need, it is the things here on these lists. Things wanted, specifically, and this is important, what it was they wanted from me.
It shouldn’t surprise, how similar all the lists are. Despite all our desperations, we should find any comfort we can in knowing that when each of us is hungry and asked to imagine time in the short term, we all believe that we will need milk, eggs, and pasta. Mostly. Sometimes ice cream. Often booze. Some are even written on sheet music or notepads with butterflies.
The lists catalog, often in boring or incomprehensible ways, the literal fuel of our lives. By its nature the grocery list implies life itself, or a desire to continue living on, into the impending void. Each list represents starting points of reality, points of convergence and departure towards eventual meals and work lunches and holidays. (The lists all take on a frenzied tone in the holiday season. Uppercase letters. Things underlined. URGENCY.)
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Remember: what’s gathered here in this reusable shopping bag are only the things that made it all the way through the shift, found themselves tucked into a pocket and driven back home and taken inside, all the way up the stairs and stashed here, inside this bag in the attic. I shudder to think of the lists lost along the way.
The bag was the first thing that they handed me when I “set sail” with the company. At orientation, I was shown where they kept the splinter kits, supplied five company t-shirts, a boxcutter, two nametags, and a handbook that’s still in here, along with every pen I’ve ever taken, about seventy-five black Sharpies, a pin button that says, “WHAT IN THE HELL IS A LYNCHBURG LEMONADE?” and some citrus cough drops turned chalky sweet with age and attic heat. I started putting the lists in immediately after I started there. I carried the bag into every shift for several years. Sometimes coworkers would find lists or more strange things and hand them over to me, surely embarrassed on my behalf.
I started work there the same day as a guy who claimed to be Hemingway's grandson. It was among the first things he ever told me. Somebody we worked with dug around later and told me that his story checked out, but I remained suspicious from that first day when I pulled into the parking lot we shared with a Red Robin and a Skechers and found him laying flat on his back asleep on the roof of his car.
People used to go every month to his apartment and watch wrestling pay-per-views. So many went that it affected the schedule. I have never read any of his writing, but I remember seeing several pictures of him in his apartment bathroom, posed naked in a bathtub full of blood. Had to be Hemingway's grandson.
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Some lists include daily/weekly itineraries, which is a dangerous tactical decision, life-wise. If the list is lost, of course then so is the day’s schedule of events which for the type of people still writing out grocery lists by hand can be a terrible burden.
Here's one of my favorites, a small piece of yellow legal pad, horribly wrinkled with the desired items printed out softly in black ink. It says this person needed to buy “slice cheese”, container chicken feed, and some kind of fruit. (See, it just says “Fruit.”) Beneath that, a plan of attack for the day ahead in America, sometime between 2014 and now.
After an hour spent each at Walmart and Petco, and a haircut at 12:30, this person had penciled themselves in some time for MERCY.
A few missing lists, either real or imagined deep enough as to be made real:
● Some pantry staples written out over the results of an STD test, (positive: chlamydia)
● Every religious pamphlet or business card or political screed I’ve ever been handed myself or else intentionally left behind for me to deal with. I remember one of them still used Michael Jackson’s death as a call for spiritual repentance a decade on.
This little Bible filled with verses of “COMFORT, ASSURANCE, SALVATION” showed up yesterday. It made it home in my pocket and that’s as far as it went. Scared I would lose it to the washing machine like so many others, I texted Sara quick from inside the produce cooler:
“There is a tiny Bible in the pocket of my pants on the kitchen chair. Can you save it for me?”
● A fake $50 bill. Once I found one of the customer bathrooms covered in fake $50 bills. They were tucked beneath the toilet seat, behind the mirror, sticking out the top of the baby changing station. The whole thing reeked of absurd libertarian zealotry, and sure enough, the messages on the bills traced back to an anti-government/abortion group head-quartered in one of the Dakotas. I remember taking one home. It has not survived.
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The grocery list traces back to an ancient form, the contents of which have been increasingly converted down to smaller and smaller quantities until it has reached its current scale: the items needed to sustain everyone’s individual homes. How many documents still exist like this?
I’ve trained hundreds of people to run a register by now. I always tell them that the list is a natural way to start a conversation with the customer. I tell them this because somebody told me that my first few times behind the line. Repetition begets more of itself. I am relieved everyday that most of what I say at work have never been my words at all.
“Are you all through with your list?” I ask after I find one buried at the bottom of a basket. How to name this small shame that I see, watching their faces change when I mention it, perhaps knowing I’ve seen something already not meant for me? Their handwriting or how they write to themselves or worse yet, how someone else writes to them. That I’ve seen what they wanted when they came in here and what they are leaving with now and that I hold judgement for the difference between the two.
“Hey, this is a judgement free zone,” I say to them, gesturing with my hands, indicating the space around my body.
I've noticed that even if the lists have served their function, (or they have been given up on,) and balled up and forgotten in there, still most people elect to take it with them when I ask, usually offering some “I better double check it” line or something similar.
Even in its absence, the proverbial list comes up as a form of conversational currency. A bit of language we can share. “I only had two things on my list” or, the inverse, “I forgot my list at home.”
“Looks like you went rogue.” I say to both and am met with appropriately measured laughter and an awkward silence I usually don’t care enough to puncture until it’s receipt time.
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I’m troubled by the photographs that I have collected and kept. Scanning them, sharing them here feels particularly invasive. To my eye, none of the same people are in any of the pictures, yet the effort remains coordinated. I found them all within a four month stretch. My greatest sin remains my ability to conflate anything, even the appearance of an avocado.
Anyway, the photos are here and if you find yourself in any of them, know that all were found tucked behind chocolate bars on racks close to the cash registers or tossed into a trash can at either one of two grocery stores in Iowa. You yourself or someone else deemed these photographs of you not worth keeping, or perhaps, not worth keeping better track of. Please know that I am sorry for all of this.
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I’m here to report from the front lines that the grocery list is fading, that the last few years have been particularly brutal to the creation of paper grocery lists, hand-written and held and referenced throughout the shopping trip. During the pandemic, most of the lists switched over to the phone and the habit has stayed. It is rarer and rarer when and if I find them these days.
The week I start writing this essay, lists start showing up again.
At the register. Left in carts. Cast aside out in the parking lot.
Last week I was collecting carts in the rain without a hi-viz vest, (career suicide, a real cardinal sin out in the retail wars,) and I found a sogging stapled stack of hospital discharge papers laying in the cart corral.
Of course I pocket them, take them around the back of the store behind a rattling cart of empty glass bottles that I'm to feed into the dumpster, and there, in the space between the trash bins where the last people still smoking cigarettes gather, I open up her medical records.
Ashley's.
How hungry we are for other people’s secrets! Shameless, this curiosity. The crooked shape of its teeth. A convenient excuse for my poorer behaviors.
Everything that you really want is in there. Under a section titled “Your Latest Vitals,” the parts of Ashley that could be measured and explained are listed and paired with a small illustration: her blood pressure, paired with a tiny heart holding a pressure gauge in its middle: 97/81; her temperature sat next to a tube thermometer and four floating lines: 98.4 °; her respiration as demonstrated by the top half of a torso and lungs, exhaling air, curling back on itself :18.
A measure of health, I think, standing there between two trash bins in the place we all call Cancer Corner. I flip the page. It takes four more turns to gather and display the entirety of her current medication regiment. I flip back to find a date of birth and notice that she is young, just turned 40 last November. Younger than my Sara.
Today’s visit is in advance of an “invasive ductal carcinoma of breast” to be done on August 7.
Breast cancer.
Her post operation care instructions round out the records. Important dates are highlighted in yellow, presumably right there in the exam room. Won’t you go there with me? Ashley is sitting there on the butcher paper, and Dr.___ is talking to her and holding a tired yellow highlighter. Dr.___ is telling Ashley how to care for herself, for her new body once parts of her current body have been removed. Two Jackson Pratt drains will remain in place, to be emptied daily and recharged as instructed. A list of symptoms are listed as being reason enough to immediately seek out the emergency room.
I am thinking now about Ashley and whether she was supposed to keep these papers safe for three weeks before her surgery. What it must be like to be already informed of future care for a procedure that hasn’t happened yet. How it will go for me some day.
Ashley _____: 7/23/2026
I’ve got no proof of this one save for this story. “Excuse me” a man in his seventies says. He’s tracked me down in front of the dairy box, straightening yogurts.
He held up his phone to me, started scrolling through many messages from his girlfriend. He was careful to say it: girl-friend. He wanted me to understand the severity of the situation. I’m sure if you asked him the last time he’d had a girlfriend, he would say that she’d become his wife. He had his phone set to 1,000 pt. font and he moved through the messages with large sweeping finger strokes, down towards his chest to move backwards in time, then back up away again to bring it all closer again. To double check. For a freckle of a moment each swipe his finger would wind up in a crooked point straight ahead or down into the ground.
His girlfriend had sent him photos and exact product names, some with the SKU numbers typed out. I could see that he was in a genuine fear of failing her, so I knew this was a second act of some kind, maybe one of the last men who never learned to grocery shop by himself, and now, widowed or divorced here in the late innings, he was trying to . This one would require my best effort.
He started pointing at pictures and off through the store we went in search of ground turkey, peanut butter, the works, and at the end, probably ten minutes spent together, we stopped at the end of the cereal aisle and counted and checked everything over again and it all looked exactly right. He even shook my hand and thanked me in earnest, and you can trust me because I am nothing if not in the business of “thank yous,” of vapid pleasantries, of saying and receiving those meaningless words so often that I have become arrogant in believing that I know when someone actually means it.
I headed back over to the dairy box, pulling gallons forward. I made it to the little cartons of goat milk, and I heard it again: “Excuse me.”
I turn to face the man. We're back here almost exactly where we started out from. He has the phone up again and l smile and give him a little wave because we have made it so far already together and I’m actually rooting for the guy now because he’s really trying to get everything right, again making me believe it’s in deference to a new love, and he looks me in the eye and asks me brutally, with full eye contact and without mercy: “Do you work here?”
My mother told me recently that when I was small and still sat up in the kid’s seat of the shopping cart, I would reach out towards the cash register and say “Bits.”
“Bits, Bits. Bits.”
She said I only ever said that word around cash registers and a little plastic Fisher Price typewriter. That should explain something about all of this, but I cannot say for certain what. I still have it here, that toy typewriter.
For my mother: Now, when kids stay in the seat and ride behind the register, those who go through my line when it is still early, before it is busy and I still possess most of my faculties, I will point at the register and say “See the bits!” and I let them hit a few buttons before sending them on back around to their parents.
On and on it goes. Another paper bag to fill. Truck to unload. List to keep.
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The Last Grocery List I Ever Keep
has lard written on it/uses a
looping cursive/ comes on
the back of an envelope that
the power bill arrived in/
contains my mother's
capital G/smells of pocket coin
and striped peppermints /gets tucked
and forgotten in the glovebox
a winter long/ shows up on
a sunday morning wearing
scars, doodles of an absent mind/
hell I wouldn’t mind a
coffee stain, a bible verse,
any other kind of
forgiveness
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This essay/list climbed out of a shopping bag full of other people’s grocery lists. I've collected them for years during my shifts. Spent the better part of August writing it. Throughout I tried to make sense of them, of collecting the lists and keeping them close. What I think they mean. It winds up with a poem about the last grocery list I'll ever keep. I pray I never find it.
Avery Gregurich lives and writes in eastern Iowa, and organizes The Out Of Towners Reading Series.
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