Drink This Smoothie

The exhibit A Life in Lists and Notes begins, appropriately enough, with lists: replicas of five-thousand-year-old clay tablets about bakery items, suggesting that humans have been marking down what’s on their minds for a while. Next are laundry lists, medical-procedure checklists, an encyclopedia, and a food rationing card from 1940s Paris: lists as records. Moving through the exhibition, it becomes clear that lists and notes do not share a single purpose, and their point, if there is one, lies in their potential. Housed in a secluded, aged barn in Glover, Vermont, these once-useful tools, now on display at the Museum of Everyday Life, can be arranged by their intent: 

Love inquiry: “Want to kiss?” is written in pen on a folded slip of paper. A brief romance was sparked by the question in 1985. The anonymous donor was offered the flirtation inside an orange rind peeled in a single, perfect spiral. The rind duplicated for the exhibit has been overtaken by mold. 

Directive: “Someone drink this smoothie!” makes its demand on a small square of paper. Clyde Watson, who submitted the note, along with several other housekeeping requests, is quoted on an accompanying placard: “Some [notes] I keep because they can be reused in the future—ever hopeful that with enough repetition, the desired effect will someday be achieved.” 

Urgent update: “CAT IS OUT” is marked in red on a door hanger either by someone or for someone who, I assume, forgets such details. Perhaps the cat’s location is a point of contention within a family, and the purpose of the door hanger is to avoid its loss. 

It is hard not to become invested in these small dramas, in particular the light bulb on which someone has scribbled “Burned out?” In note after note, list after list, they are expressions of various wants—to remember, to name, to organize, to communicate, to act.

Amid so many desires, it makes sense that, of all the museum’s calls for contributors over the years, its request for lists and notes received, by far, the most submissions. These calls, which go out each year on Valentine’s Day, reflect its larger aim: to catalog life through the contemplation of what is unglamorous but still consequential. (Previous calls have included dust, mirrors, pencils, scissors, and knots.) Typically, contributors send one or two items. For A Life in Lists and Notes...