Sentence:  His energy was prodigious ; sometimes he would <WSD>be</WSD> up before dawn , clad as a garbage collector and hurling pails into areaways to exasperate us , and thereafter would hurry to the Bronx Zoo to grimace at the lions and press cigar butts against their paws . 
Meaning of the word marked with <WSD> tags:  have the quality of being; (copula, used with an adjective or a predicate noun)