There is that picture of him, gracing the cover of an old paperback copy of PT 109, slender, smiling, his Navy Captain hat at a tilt, shirt opened an extra button, standing, his right hand upon a cane, from his tour in the Solomon Islands. Poor bastard. How little then, one guesses, he knew what was in store for him. The gift of Type O blood. The energy, the quick firing of adrenaline. A quick guy, in mind and body. Restless. Of course he was restless. No wonder he had all that energy to go back out to find a rescuer after the Japanese destroyer had cut their boat in half.

John F. Kennedy, classic type O person. (Some information out there has him as AB, but his Presidential Library website confirms my suspicions.) Classic O ailments, particularly thyroid insufficiency. Colitis. Ulcers. Allergies.

But more than that, his personality, his temperament. A magnificent physical specimen. A leader. An extrovert. An active man, fond of exercise. Swimming when he couldn't do anything else. A guy who couldn't sit still. An intuitive mind. A mind speeding at the pace of a Pogues song, insatiably in need of feeding. If he hadn't been so well-informed, calm and rational and well-read, he could almost be taken as a paranoid type. (Many of his time, like big steel, thought he thought too much.) At least he wasn't the kind of guy to just say, "oh, sure," to everything. He thought about it, considered matters in a broad way.

Boredom. The modern illness. He experienced it as a member of the House of Representatives. In Os it leads to risk taking. Perhaps it was boredom as much as anything that made him run for the Senate, which of course was a risk, a big risk. His adventurous attitude is legend, and one might say, "why, of course he liked to screw!" His thyroid out of whack, they had him on cortisone. Who knows what that did to him. And time and time again, he rose to the task at hand.

A friend quotes him, considering the prospects of life after the Presidency, book writing, etc. "You don't understand. I need somewhere to go every day." And yet, downtime would have been good for him. Os need downtime. They need outlets. They need calm and the time to find it.

His call to us was atavistic, in a completely civilized and thoughtful way, and so did he excite the emotions of a nation and even the world. He spoke with an eloquence informed by his physical nature, a real moral compass, informed by the gut instinct of his physical nature (like, I suppose, many writers.)

Modern society should take into account the nature of the human being, the susceptibility to mistreating the animal based on what works for the kind of blood and chemistry running within. Understanding of that, rather than retrograde cruelty, industrial mill conditions, imprisonment for ailments, the various cages we throw each other in, economically, class-based, of predisposed and biased attitude toward another.

So may we all find some forgiveness and an offer of understanding to our own selves, at least, and the way we may have acted.