Remembering the Beast

Today is May 8, and it is the 64th birthday of my Uncle Beast. This is the first birthday since his recent passing, so I'll have to eat cake all by myself. Oh, and he'd probably want me to scare up some homemade ice-cream to go with it. He left this world last October just before Zev was born. The way I see it, they must have passed each other, as one was entering and the other exiting. My palm reader made an allusion to the idea that Beast and Zev share the same soul. I'd like to think that it's so. I sometimes place their pictures alongside each other and see a similarity in their cherubic faces.
His given name was Stuart, but to me and a few others in the family, he was the Beast. Why was he a Beast? Not sure, because the name was around before I was. He had a voracious appetite and loved to eat- maybe like a Beast would. He liked to wrestle and crack toes- again, maybe like a Beast would...but he was ferociously loving and loyal. So, maybe a Beast could be seen in many different ways.
Beast and I have millions of memories together, but we were mostly bonded by a shared burden: we loved two men that are tough to love- my grandfather, Izzy, and my father(his brother). Not that these two men are unlovable, but they just don't make it easy on anyone. Beast and I were continuously trying to impress my Dad and "earn" his love. With my grandfather, Beast was nurturing. And, Izzy is not the type to accept any kind of tenderness into his life. But Beast pushed on and continued to nurture his widowed father up until the last few months of his life. In fact, Beast kept his own diagnosis a secret from Izzy up until his last weeks here in this world. Izzy still insists that he knew all along. Who knows?
I can picture the two of them doing their grocery shopping together at all of the supermarkets in Margate, Florida: Beast holding Izzy's coupons while Izzy scanned all of the prices on the canned goods, in order to make sure that he was buying each item from the correct store. Izzy doesn't show love, but he did tell me once that he thought Beast was handsome like a movie-star.
Beast and I ate together , traveled overseas together, and gossiped a whole lot. Whenever I needed a pep-talk or someone to vent about my dad with- I knew who to go to.
He was a yo-yo dieter, sometimes bearded and always bespectacled. He wore a unicorn medallion necklace which came from a jewelery store in New Orleans. Beast had seen a lot of the world and was quite familiar with China. In fact, he took me there when I was a student in Acupuncture School. We stayed at a famous hotel near Beijing designed by I.M Pei. I introduced him to the joys of Hawthorne berry candies and salty-sour plums. He took me to have desert at the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, just so I could see how fancy the ladies room was. I didn't have to do anything to make him love me, and that's what set him apart from the other men in our family.
Beast cooked, shopped and read trashy mysteries. He and his wife of 41 years, whom we call the Goose, watched their many t.v shows and baseball games together in their little wood paneled den. They read, solved cross-word puzzles and drank wine in their astro-turfed indoor porch. They were truly best friends, even though Beast would get in trouble for leaving a dirty dish here and there.
He and his pancreas(and also his liver) spent a year trying to figure out if they could live with cancer, or not. He sailed through several months strong and beastly , and we were all in denial of his bleak prognosis. I really can't feel cheated that he was taken away. Magical people like Beast appear few times in one's life, and you do whatever you can to share as much as possible with them. If you're smart, you grab every little morsel.
Anyway, Beast, happy birthday wherever you are.