I just copied much of the Nelson article and sent it to my son in London.

The pictures of the skin condition reminded me of what he has and has been controlling with the steroid creams.

The article was especially interesting to me because of its mention of urticaria... I used to have it really badly when I was in college.

However I learned from going to the University nurse that lots of students had it around test time.

She prescribed Actifed for all of us... it worked great for me.

Once I learned that, though, I realized I was stressed (I don't think it was the tests for me, for me there were other things). And once I recognized that, well... I stopped getting it.

In London I knew a woman who had it so badly on her face that it was hard to look at her, because of the disfigurement and the look of pain.

She and her husband, he from a quite well-to-do family and she from a missionary family had adopted two little black kids. The kids ran circles around their parents...

One day when my son and I were to tea at their house, which backed onto Regent's Canal, I told her that I had been great friends with one of the black Green Bay Packers in their days of winning the Super Bowl under Vince Lombardi, and that I had thought about what it would be like to be a mixed race couple.

After that, the woman's urticaria was less visible on her face...

or maybe having made "contact" with her on such a basic level, I simply wasn't able to see it so much any more.

But I think, that in reality when someone talked to her about mixed race families, that it relieved some of the stress...



Thanks so much for the gluten info.

Really appreciate it.
.

I've been thinking about the woman I knew... and I think I didn't describe our tea conversation very well.

When we were talking I told her what I'd thought about her, before I knew her. Because in our neighborhood you'd tend to see people, because it was a small Islington neighborhood.

So I think she may well have been wondering if people thought she was in a mixed marriage... millions of questions. So when I told her what I thought, then it pinned down what at least one person had thought... and it sort of deflated some of her worries.

That's what I think happened. I don't think it was me dispensing words of wisdom, or anything.

Gosh, what a long time ago that was.

.