WEBVTT

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A few very recent poems
Why California will never

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be like Tuscany.

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I was in Italy a few years ago
and it was very enlightening

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and lots of fun.

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I tell you, I learned
one really good thing.

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I learned several
but the one I want

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to share with you is none
of the people I went out

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to dinner with ever anywhere in
Italy ordered a bottle of wine.

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What they got was a
carafe of the house wine.

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And I said, well,
aren't you ever going

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to order those nice
bottles of wine

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like we get them in
California from Italy?

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And they said oh, those
are only for very, very

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special occasions.

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In the carafes of the house,
we were perfectly good.

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So what have I been doing?

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There must have been huge
oaks and pines and Cedars

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and maybe madrone in
Tuscany and Umbria long ago.

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A few centuries after
the wood was gone,

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they begin to build with
stone, brick and stone

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farmhouses, solid fireproof,
steel shutters and doors

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but farming changed.

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60,000, 60,000 vacant solid
fireproof Italian farmhouses

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on the real estate market in
1970 scattered across the land.

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60,000 affluent
foreigners to fix them,

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learn to cook and write a book.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Mostly English, French,
and German some Americans.

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But in California,
houses all are wood.

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Roads pushed through, sewers
dug, lines laid underground,

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hundreds of thousands made of
strand board, sheet, plaster.

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They won't be here
200 years from now.

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They won't be here
20 years from now.

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Some of them,
they'll burn or rot.

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No,

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Handsome solid second homes
for 1,000 years later,

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wealthy Melanesians or
Inuit bohemian artists.

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Oak and pine will soon return.

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