Sheetrock & Shellac A Thinking Person's Guide to the Art and Science of Home Improvement

Chapter One: Rooms and Dreams The best-selling poet in America in the nineteen-thirties was also a newspaper columnist, a small-time actor, and a successful designer of Hawaii-themed dinnerware. His name was Don Blanding. He wore an oversized fedora and had a Clark Gable mustache, and he described himself as an "artist by nature, actor by instinct, poet by accident, vagabond by choice." He was born in Kingfisher, Oklahoma Territory, in 1894. In 1912, he saved the life of a six-year-old neighbor, Billie Cassin, who grew up to be the actress Joan Crawford. In 1915, he briefly shared an apartment in Chicago with the novelist and playwright Sherwood Anderson. For a few years in the nineteen-forties, he was married to the crayon heiress Dorothy Binney. He was famous for having no fixed address, but he kept turning up in certain favorite warm-weather locales, mainly in Florida, Hawaii, and California. He died in 1957, at the age of sixty-two. In 1986, the musician Jimmy Buffett borrowed the title of one of his poetry collections,Floridays,for a song (which he dedicated partly to Blanding) and an album. I first heard about Blanding from a friend, who had bought one of his books at a flea market and thought that I would get a kick out of it. The book is calledVagabond's House.It was first published in 1928, was reprinted more than fifty times during the next couple of decades, and is still in print today, though only barely. I bought my own copy from a used-book dealer; the flyleaf is inscribed "Aloha Don Blanding." The book is -- well, the book is virtually unreadable. And the illustrations, which are also by Blanding, are on the creepy side, full of statuesque naked ladies and dated-looking silhouettes. But the title poem is kind of captivating: When I have a house...as I sometime may...I'll suit my fancy in every way.I'll fill it with things that have caught my eyeIn drifting from Iceland to Molokai.It won't be correct or to period styleBut...oh, I've thought for a long, long whileOf all the corners and all the nooks,Of all the bookshelves and all the books,The great big table, the deep soft chairsAnd the Chinese rug at the foot of the stairs,(it's an old, old rug from far Chow Wanthat a Chinese princess once walked on). My house will stand on the side of a hillBy a slow broad river, deep and still,With a tall lone pine on guard nearbyWhere the birds can sing and the storm winds cry.A flagstone walk with lazy curvesWill lead to the door where a Pan's head servesAs a knocker there like a vibrant drumTo let me know that a friend has come,And the door will squeak as I swing it wideTo welcome you to the cheer inside. And there are a couple hundred more lines, all written in the same merrily sprung anapestic blandometer. I've never drifted from Iceland to Molokai, and I don't own a Chinese rug or a Pan's head door knocker (although I now sporadically search for both on eBay), and some of Blanding's decorating touches are mildly disturbing -- "An impressionistic smear called 'Sin,'/ a nude on a striped zebra skin," "a nook / For a savage idol that I took / from a ruined temple in Peru, / A demon-chaser named Mang-Chu" -- but the impulse that drove his fantasy must be close to universal. The theme of Blanding's poem is the same happy daydreaming that leads to the construction of tree houses, backyard forts, ice-fishing shacks, cottages at the beach, and three-bedroom raised ranches in suburban New Jersey. The Vagabond's reverie is a reverie of shelter. Don Blanding is unrelated to Jim Blandings, the fictional protagonist of Eric Hodgins's 1946 novel,Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House(which was made into a movie, starring Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, in 1948, and was remade, asThe Money Pit,in 1986), but Blanding and Blandings share aOwen, David is the author of 'Sheetrock & Shellac A Thinking Person's Guide to the Art and Science of Home Improvement', published 2007 under ISBN 9780743251204 and ISBN 0743251202.