OLLI Intercession

I hoped it would have been a custom to use about half the week of each OLLI intercession for a small respite someplace else.  Covid undermined that the last two semesters.  I cannot even remember what I did instead during those two breaks from class.  This semester brought more possibilities.  I had cancelled a vacation to the Everglades at the peak of the last infection surge.  Maybe now.  My son and daughter-in-law now live in driving range.  I could visit them while enjoying Pittsburgh, where I've never really been beyond minor transit needs.  So I checked which week.  Alas, it coincides with Pesach.  No travel.

For OLLI it makes very good sense to select that as the transition week, irrespective of what else appears on public calendars.  As the curriculum goes to a Zoom format, there is are five and eleven week sessions. This week falls between the two fives.  As a medical student at the Jesuit SLU, the undergraduate campus had their spring hiatus based on a calendar to have it fall in mid-March, much like other universities in America.  The medical campus, though, followed a different calendar, selecting the Catholic Holy Days as the week off.  As a useful consequence, I don't think I ever attended Seder in St. Louis, though I have made arrangements to eat at WashU Hillel for the later days of Pesach.

Now that I know the OLLI calendar, what might I do instead of travel?  OLLI classes do not really absorb that much time, about four hours a week, roughly what one undergraduate class would comprise.  There is not much effort outside the class times, at least not by full-time university standards.  When classes met on campus, I would take two sessions on a single day, staying on site between classes.  This added time devoted to the OLLI experience, though very worthwhile socialization time.  And I had to travel round trip to do this.  So Zoom OLLI comprises a fraction of the time commitment of campus OLLI.  Even if I could take a trip for OLLI's off week, just getting to any desired destination would exceed the time I actually spend with the Lifelong Learning program.

Instead of a novel experience, this year's OLLI suspension  brings me parts of the familiar, maybe a few parts innovative, just as Pesach should be.