A few very recent poems Why California will never
be like Tuscany.
I was in Italy a few years ago and it was very enlightening
and lots of fun.
I tell you, I learned one really good thing.
I learned several but the one I want
to share with you is none of the people I went out
to dinner with ever anywhere in Italy ordered a bottle of wine.
What they got was a carafe of the house wine.
And I said, well, aren't you ever going
to order those nice bottles of wine
like we get them in California from Italy?
And they said oh, those are only for very, very
special occasions.
In the carafes of the house, we were perfectly good.
So what have I been doing?
There must have been huge oaks and pines and Cedars
and maybe madrone in Tuscany and Umbria long ago.
A few centuries after the wood was gone,
they begin to build with stone, brick and stone
farmhouses, solid fireproof, steel shutters and doors
but farming changed.
60,000, 60,000 vacant solid fireproof Italian farmhouses
on the real estate market in 1970 scattered across the land.
60,000 affluent foreigners to fix them,
learn to cook and write a book.
[LAUGHTER]
Mostly English, French, and German some Americans.
But in California, houses all are wood.
Roads pushed through, sewers dug, lines laid underground,
hundreds of thousands made of strand board, sheet, plaster.
They won't be here 200 years from now.
They won't be here 20 years from now.
Some of them, they'll burn or rot.
No,
Handsome solid second homes for 1,000 years later,
wealthy Melanesians or Inuit bohemian artists.
Oak and pine will soon return.