Photo Nick Bragg
Age Your Way : A Conversation on Aging, Choice, and Self-Expression By Taylor Gerlach
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ging … everybody’s doing it. If you’ve been around the ACCA for any amount of time, you’ll recognize one of the taglines and pillars of our philosophy. Everyone may be in this lifelong process together, but aging couldn’t look more different for different folks. In a mosaic of perspectives and mindsets, we’re all engaging with aging in our own distinct ways. With May as Older Americans Month, we are celebrating this patchwork of ideologies and diving into how folks in our community choose to age. This agency–choosing the way we age–is central here. The tangled mess of social expectations and messages surrounding how we present ourselves certainly affects the ever-evolving self-expression we ultimately choose. There is no right or wrong, just the path we choose each day. For Rashe Malcolm, owner of Rashe’s Cuisine on Vine Street, her own aging journey connects her with her family and 6 I CON N E C T I ON S I SPRING 2022
her heritage. As a child, she remembers helping her grandmother brush out her great-grandmother’s long, white hair. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she recalls looking forward to having those beautiful bright locks. She recently shared on social media that she remembers thinking “I can’t wait for my hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, and pesky facial hair to turn all white and share the journey that got me there.” Now, it’s happening. As her hair starts to change, Malcolm welcomes the new color as a tangible connection across generations to those precious memories. It has even been a serendipitous opportunity to uncover more about her heritage. In talking with her mother in preparation to share about her aging journey and family heritage, she found a forgotten shoebox. Inside, untouched family records and heirlooms awaited discovery. Pulling out records and fuzzy black and white photographs, she learned that her great-great-grandmother was born in Athens, and they’re more alike than she could have guessed.