An End and A Beginning

Diane Keaton’s death hit me harder than I expected. Not because I followed her career closely. I couldn’t even name many of her movies. I had to be reminded that she played Michael Corleone’s wife in The Godfather. But I’ll never need reminding that she was Annie Hall.

What made Annie Hall so special to me wasn’t just that it was a glorious, funny movie with Woody Allen at his creative (and spider-killing) best. It wasn’t the men’s ties or floppy hats that Annie made famous. It was the time in my life when I first saw it.

In the spring of 1977, I was a medical student at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Though I lived on campus, I spent most of my free time with friends in Rogers Park. We’d hang out, hear some music, go to the movies.

One night, a movie-loving friend called to say he wanted to see the new Woody Allen flick, Annie Hall. I picked him up in my beat-up Mercury Comet, and we headed to suburbia for the 8:00 show.

I loved the movie, without realizing it would be a kind of ending. Annie Hall was the last film I’d see before a new part of my life began.

Annie Hall was the last movie I saw without Barb. We’ve been sharing coming attractions, armrests, and Raisinets ever since that spring of 1977. She may not be much of a Woody Allen fan (who is these days), and we don’t always agree on what deserves two thumbs up, but she’s a damn good movie partner.

So, Miss Keaton, I’m sure Annie Hall will be streaming again soon. Maybe I’ll talk Barb into watching it with me — or maybe I’ll call one of those old friends instead. We can kill a spider or two. No big deal.

Or as Diane Keaton’s Annie would say, “la dee dah, la dee dah.”

AI Can Wait

“I don’t see why anyone should even care about teaching cursive handwriting anymore. That time would be better spent teaching kids how to use AI.”

It is no surprise that the friend saying this to me was a technologically proficient 30-something woman with an East Coast background. She was quite confident in her pronouncement. And I am confident she is wrong. Swapping cursive for AI is a trade I’m not interested in making.

I am aware of the arguments against teaching cursive. Who needs it? After all, who really writes anymore in a world of keyboarding, thumb-typing, and voice recognition?

The “technical” answer is that learning handwriting helps with other skills: fine motor skill development, hand-eye coordination, memory retention, and the ability to read historical documents.

Besides those “hard” reasons, there are “soft” ones, too. Handwriting is an opportunity for creativity. Calligraphy is a true art. And the little flowers and hearts that dot i’s and j’s have so much more personality than emojis chosen from the same list as everyone else uses.

If we applied a similar logic, the argument against teaching cursive could extend beyond the handwriting issue. Art, literature, music— for most students, none of those will lead to lucrative careers in medicine, technology, or the law. Why expose a second-grader to them at all?

“Let them learn how to use AI instead,” she said.

I am quite fond of AI. I frequently use it in its various forms. But I began using them after I had learned how to think critically, how to frame an argument, and how to write an essay (or a blog post).

If I were still involved in education and designing a curriculum, cursive would remain a primary-grade staple. AI can wait. Kids don’t need to meet ChatGPT until they know how to live and learn without it.

It’s not all about football.

I rarely spend time on online videos. But the other day, a Facebook reel titled Eight Minutes of Ridiculous caught my eye. I clicked and spent the next eight minutes enjoying perfection.

The video was a compilation of kick-off and punt returns by Football Hall of Famer Devin Hester, the return man who electrified Bears fans for almost a decade.

You don’t need to be a football fan to appreciate the flawlessness of those plays. Hester would field a kick, glance at the eleven angry men charging at him, and in an instant make his choice. Sometimes he’d hesitate, other times he’d surge forward, or when it seemed prudent, cut back or dart to the side.

He could slip past tacklers or simply outrun them, with bursts of speed that left defenders gasping. You could feel his joy, as well as that of the teammates who threw their bodies into blocks to clear his path. For the man who returned more kicks for touchdowns than anyone else in NFL history, his end-zone celebrations were strikingly modest.

The videos also capture the amazement in the voices of countless announcers. Even neutral broadcasters couldn’t help but sound awed. But it was Jeff Joniak, the Bears’ radio voice, who immortalized Hester with his call: “Devin Hester, you are ridiculous.” Ever since, in Chicago, “Hester” and “ridiculous” have been synonymous.

Perfection is rare: Nadia Comăneci’s perfect 10 in 1976. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. The first iPhone design. Some say perfection is the enemy of good. But for eight minutes in my office, perfection in motion brought me joy at a time when joy can be hard to find.

Thank you, Devin Hester. You are, indeed, ridiculous.

I Missed Out On Jury Duty, But My Perry Mason Dream Lives On.

The benefits of aging are numerous: a Senior property tax exemption, healthcare from Medicare, and an income stream from Social Security. But I recently learned of a new “benefit”, and I find it bittersweet. I will soon lose the opportunity to be a juror.

I thought I had a chance. I had received a summons to be available for jury duty at the county courthouse next week. I kept my schedule clear, and Friday night was set to visit the county website to find out which days I should report to the courthouse. But the county beat me to it. I received a text telling me that my service would not be needed at all.

And that probably ends my prospects for being a juror. In less than four months, I will hit the magic age after which compliance with a summons to jury duty is no longer compulsory. My birthdate will become an automatic “Get Out of Jury Duty Free Card.” I doubt the county will bother to summon me again.

I am disappointed. Jurisprudence runs in the family. Barb has sat on a jury for a pair of trials. My mother served on the jury for the infamous Mirage Bar trial in the 1970s. But I’ve never taken a juror’s oath. On my only previous summons, I made the drive north to the county seat, but never saw the inside of a courtroom.

Why do I want to sit in the jury box? It’s a childhood dream. I want to be there when the music plays and Perry Mason, attorney for the defense, strides into the courtroom.

I grew up watching Mason humiliate prosecutor Hamilton Burger every Sunday night, week after week, year after year. I admired investigator Paul Drake and was smitten with legal secretary Della Street. I waited along with the rest of America until the turning point in each episode. I knew that under Mason’s intense questioning, a witness would break down and admit to the crime Mason’s client was accused of. Mason never lost, and justice always prevailed.

TV law shows today are too muddy and indecisive. The Lincoln Lawyer has some tricks up his sleeve, but compared to Mason, he’s barely passed the bar. Has he ever terrified a witness into confessing on the stand? Jurors at his trials must be nodding off to sleep out of boredom.

Which makes it just as well that my only jury duty will be in my imagination. I may never serve on a real jury, but I’ll keep my Perry Mason fantasy intact. And my Della Street one, too. That verdict is final!

If you want to send me a message without going through Substack, email me directly at lesrraffblogger@myyahoo.com

From the Microscope to Life’s Bigger Picture

Some pathologists are balkers. They dither and debate, unable to decide until every morsel of information has been individually processed, every unlikely diagnosis ruled out. When they hear hoof beats, they don’t just think of zebras; they think of zebras that have been extinct for 100,000 years. You cannot run a pathology department with a batch of balkers.

Michael Kaufman, MD, who passed away last month, was not a balker. If he had a motto, it was “Let’s get this done. Now.”

Mike was one of the attending physicians during my pathology residency at Evanston Hospital in Chicago’s northern suburbs. I was at Evanston for four years. He was there for almost 40.

There were many outstanding pathologists at the hospital during my training. But none were better than Mike in evaluating the big picture. The answer to a diagnosis on a biopsy wasn’t necessarily in the minute details of each slide, but rather, as he put it, in the gestalt. The moment the first field of a slide hit the microscope stage, he had an impression of the diagnosis and knew what he wanted to do to confirm it.

Mike was rarely wrong, and even less often inefficient. With caffeine as his fuel, he would glance at a stack of slide trays, calculate the number of slides they contained, and set a time limit for completing that afternoon’s work. When a rafter of residents was slow, Mike pushed them along like a golf ranger urging a slow foursome to pick up their pace.

He needed to be that efficient. Mike was the master of the side hustle before the term even existed. He always had some place else he needed to get to, or a case he had to study for his sideline medico-legal consulting services.

He was happy to spread the wealth, hooking the residents up with Medical Records gigs, and even ear-piercing at the local Carson, Pirie, Scott’s Department Store. We were also his off-site autopsy service, performing post-mortem exams at other North Shore hospitals. If not for Mike, I never would have driven around town with formalin-fixed body parts in the trunk of my car—something I never did mention to Barb.

I learned how to be a better pathologist, time manager, and entrepreneur from Mike. Those lessons guided my career. But my most vivid memory is of him walking through the lab with little Jamie on his shoulders—showing us all that joy belongs alongside work.

Mike was never a balker, in medicine or in life. May his memory be a blessing.

It’s Hard To Resist When Artificial Intelligence Offers to Write Your Blog Post

I came close to caving in. But I’m not ready to do it yet…

Today, an old marketing tagline popped into my head. It was from the 1960s, an era when I was watching plenty of Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear on TV, and Kellogg’s Cereal was the superstar advertiser of all those cartoon shows. Each ad for their sugar-sweetened apple-flavored crunchy cereal ended with “Apple Jacks will not be sold to bullies.”

I thought that line, nostalgia for the 60s, and commentary for the current day would make a nice amalgamation for a 500-word blog post. It should have been easy. But then I checked my files and saw that in the past year, I have written two posts about bullies, beginning with a holy terror from my high school days and concluding with the unholy Donald Trump. I didn’t see how I could drink from that well a third time.

But we are in 2025, not 1965, so I decided to see what AI would say. I clicked ChatGPT’s tab on my toolbar and gave the program the following instructions:

Create a blog post relevant to today, recalling the old tag line of Apple Jacks cereal that “Apple Jacks will not be sold to bullies.”

In less time than it took for me to type the prompt, the chatbot produced a well-executed, near publishable version of what it thought I wanted to say on the subject.

It wasn’t perfect; for one thing, it was loaded with em-dashes, the trademark of AI. And the first version was too preachy. But with a few rounds of suggestions and responses, I had a piece that met my standards to deliver to the Substack world.

I could have justified the post as the best of both worlds, a plug-in hybrid, combining my gas with the website’s electricity. But unlike Oscar Wilde, I can (sometimes) resist temptation.

So I’m not using the Frankensteinish creation. This is my post, all my own words, that you are reading. Every mistake, cliché, and bad simile is mine and mine alone.

Maybe someday I’ll discover something new I want to say about bullies. Until then, just keep eating your Apple Jacks. A bowl a day might keep Presidents and AI away.

On the art of small talk, bottle-cap lasagna, and why I’ll stick to haiku.

You’re Probably Doing Small Talk Wrong was the headline for a guest essay in the New York Times this week. Maya Rossignac-Milon and Erica Boothby dissect the art of small talk, particularly those first few minutes when you meet someone new, be it on the job, at a cocktail party, or on a pickleball court.

The authors, both behavioural scientists, argue that our meet-and-greets often fall flat when they consist of exchanging standard formalities, such as “How are you?” and “How was your weekend?” or (in Chicago) “Da Bears.” If we want to create bonds with the people we are meeting, Rossignac-Milon and Boothby maintain that riffing is the way to go.

I had heard of riffing in music, but never in terms of conversation. The article doesn’t define the process, but my browser’s AI describes it as “the spontaneous exchange of comments, in a playful manner, where participants build on each other’s thoughts.” That’s a mouthful, but the Times article gives the following example:

“How was your weekend?” “Good, but I spent way too much time watching people make tiny food on TikTok.” “Whoa, like … dollhouse-size?” “Yes! If you want to learn to make a lasagna in a bottle cap, let me know.”

I have never had a conversation even remotely approximating that one. I don’t think I am capable of it. For me, conversations rarely veer into bottle-cap lasagna territory. In fact, they usually stall out right around ‘Where are you from?’

Give me time to prepare, and I’m fine — my remarks to the Lake County Finance Board about mosquito control even earned a mention in the Tribune. I can write blog posts, plays, even haiku.

But riffing? Not so much. I’ve never been fond of miniature food, anyway.

From Sloppy Sam to Dr. Emanuel: What Really Makes Students Learn

“Virtually no one can hand write 125 words per minute for 90 minutes.”

That’s a quote from an article by Ezekiel Emanuel (Rahm and Ari’s brother) in Thursday’s New York Times. The article discusses his decision to ban cellphones and laptops from his classroom at the University of Pennsylvania. His justification is that while a student may be able to speed type an entire lecture into their device, no one can do the same while writing by hand. Thus, the student must mentally process the lecture in real time to take adequate notes. The result is a deeper understanding of the material, leading to better learning.

I agree with Dr. Emanuel’s philosophy, but while he sees handwritten notes as a guarantee of deeper engagement, my own experience as a student showed that it doesn’t always work. In fact, it is what the worst teacher in my Chicago Public School education required his students to do!

I attended Sullivan High School in Rogers Park, Class of 1972. In those days, long before it earned a reputation as a “newcomer center,” Sullivan was a highly regarded high school serving a predominantly middle-class population. We had many fine educators, but sadly, not all our teachers reached a level of excellence.

Like all incoming freshmen, I was required to take a course called Early World History. My teacher, Sam, was an unkempt man, probably in his late fifties. Sloppy Sam’s classes never varied.

“Take out your notebooks,” he would say a moment after the bell rang to begin the period. He would begin to recite, and our only task was to capture every word. “Roman numeral II, Part B, subpart iv, Causes of Peloponnesian War,” he would drone. Thirty pens scribbled his outline into thirty spiral-bound notebooks, careful that every subheading and every detail was correct.

On a Friday before the end of each grading quarter, we would turn in our notebooks. The following Monday, we would have them back again, graded, any omissions noted, and the lecture cycle would resume.

And as Dr. Emanuel would suggest, no mental processing of Early World History was taking place.

I have had other poor teachers — the computer science instructor who needed the class to teach her computer science, the Hebrew teacher who thought teaching meant terrorizing his students. Fortunately, their number pales compared to the wonderful teachers and professors I have learned from.

I have never forgotten Sloppy Sam; it’s the causes of the Peloponnesian War that still befuddle me. While Emanuel may be right about banning devices in the classroom, it is not how you take your notes; it is the skill and passion of the instructor that makes learning come alive.

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A neighborhood walk turns into a lesson in friendship, concern, and resilience.

I’m usually a solo walker. Along with our labradoodle, Cooper, I cover two to four miles a day, looping around our neighborhood and greeting neighbors and their dogs. Sometimes Barb joins us, and if the day feels glorious, I’ll treat Cooper to a drive to a nearby park, where we can climb the sledding hill as part of our route.

Last week, two friends, Jack and Greg, invited me to join their Wednesday walk. I did a quick loop with Cooper, then drove with them to an access point on the Des Plaines River Trail. Caps on, sunscreen applied, water bottles in hand, we set out into the warm midweek sun.

The wide gravel trail wound through shady woods, alive with walkers, joggers, bikers—and the occasional pile of horse manure. We talked about family, sports, and old jobs as the miles slipped by. When my watch told us we’d hit three miles, we turned and headed back.

Walking three abreast through the forest reminded me of Stand By Me, the 1985 film where four boys trek along the railroad tracks in search of a body. We could have been their senior counterparts, though our only quest was exercise and camaraderie.

Near the parking lot, almost six miles in, Greg suddenly asked Jack if he was okay. Jack said yes—then crumpled to the gravel, flat on his back. His face was pale, but he was breathing and had a pulse.

In that moment, the doctor you want at your side is not a retired pathologist like me. Fortunately, Greg’s long career was in anesthesiology. He quickly sized up Jack’s condition: dehydration. Together, we eased Jack upright, and before long, he was sipping water, color returning to his cheeks.

We walked slowly to the car. Jack bounced back quickly and insisted we keep to our lunch plans. I checked in the next day, and he was fine.

Yesterday I heard Bob Stroud play Ben E. King’s Stand by Me on his Rock’n’Roll Roots radio program. It brought me back to the movie, to our walk, and to standing with Jack as he recovered.

We didn’t need a body at the end of our walk—friendship, concern, and relief were more than enough.

The play’s the thing.

Are you a regular reader of mine? Do you remember my unsuccessful foray into playwrighting? Two years ago, I wrote a two-act play, a dialogue-heavy drama. A part-time dramaturge I know polished it and sent the shining version to a theater producer he has worked with. The producer was dismissive, the golf season was starting, and after writing a blog post about the experience, the play went into the purgatory of an archived Word file.

Until this week, when two unrelated circumstances have joined to give me the push I need to revisit that dusty file.

First came a notification from a Facebook playwriting group. A Chicago theater company was advertising a new play competition for previously unpublished works. The submission process was easy and online, and unlike many other competitions, no entry fee was required. This seemed like an opportunity for a neophyte like me.

A few days later, I was listening to an audiobook of a thoroughly awful novel. It was a murder mystery-psychological thriller dripping with misplaced metaphors and even sillier similes. Despite the poor prose and not knowing or caring “who did it,” I listened day after day.

My patience was rewarded when I heard one of the characters, an elderly, dying mystery writer, say to his daughter, “We should talk.” SPOILER ALERT: Those words are a key line of dialogue in my play.

I have decided I cannot ignore two signals, both pointing me in the same direction. I want to get in.

I’ve located an early draft of the play, a draft from before the dramaturge held sway. While I appreciate his help, I want to be where the characters still feel like my own. This is where I am beginning.

I’m carefully reviewing the producer’s comments and reflecting on the few bits he thought worked well and the roughly 95% he thought didn’t work at all. I’m creating new scenes and new relationships. I am eliminating clunky dialogue. I’m keeping that “we should talk” line, but I’m giving it greater impact.

It’s a blast waking up my old characters, working and molding them in their own images, as they whisper to me what they need to do and say. I love them all, even the more despicable ones.

The deadline for submission is August 31. A countdown clock on the theater company’s website tells me that as of now, I have nineteen days and fifteen hours of prep time left.

Do I anticipate winning the contest? It’s a long shot. But I’m giving it a try. Because, as one of my more optimistic characters says, “You can never run out of hope.”