Remembering Robyn

I know I haven’t written a blog in forever, but I found out that Robyn Livingstone, one of my old friends from Jacob’s Well, died in hospital last night. I’ve been trying to do some creative writing every Friday morning, and I thought I could write about my friend as a way to start processing my grief.

Robyn was tall and lanky, unkempt, but in a way that seemed intentional instead of neglectful. He was usually clad in skinny jeans and a T-shirt, with a ball cap to cover his stringy hair. I never had any clue how old he was, but I remember his birthday was in mid-May.

It was impossible to find Robyn on demand, but you’d run into him everywhere. He made it his job to stay informed about every free event happening in Vancouver (especially festivals, and anything of a musical, theatrical, poetic or artistic nature). He’d plan to attend every one of them, including paid events, if he could score a volunteer role, like his annual stint at the Folk Festival. He was extroverted enough to want to be where the people are, and introverted enough to remain on the fringes of the action; he always seemed to have an exit plan and never stayed put for long. In fact, I have no memories in which he is seated. Maybe that’s why everyone called him “Rockin’ Robyn.”

He’d usually show up at Jacob’s Well five minutes before we locked up, and he’d follow the staff around as we cleaned up, leaving piles of papers on our freshly wiped tables. (In his omnipresent backpack, Robyn kept a collection of coffee-stained flyers and wrinkled copies of community papers, having pre-circled in ballpoint pen anything he found especially pertinent, including his own published poems in the Carnegie newsletter, or details about upcoming neighbourhood events where he hoped to see us.) He’d insert himself into our clean-up conversation with a non sequitur: “Wasn’t that an excellent concert?” What concert? “The one at the Carnegie yesterday.” I wasn’t there! “Where were you? Oh gosh you really missed out...” You had to get used to his gentle scolding about everything you’d missed out on; it seemed physically impossible to be all the places where Robyn was.

He was responsible for almost 90% of the clutter on my desk at Jacob’s Well, and it wasn’t just flyers… he’d leave miscellaneous gifts for me without explanation: a plastic toy cow, some colourful nurse scrubs, a small plastic head that looked like Bob Newhart’s, a book (possibly because the woman on the cover looked something like me?). I still have this art piece that my friend and Jacob’s Well colleague, Kat, made for me before she moved to L.A.; it was composed of all the random things she found on my desk, mostly left by Robyn, including the creepy severed head. She framed it with a compressed pile of flyers from my desk that had yet to reach the recycling bin.

Robyn had one consistent mood: erratically jovial. He had this kind of soft-spoken excitement. He was somehow both childlike and gentlemanly. He could be impulsive, but never in a scary way; his gangly, unpredictable movements seemed intended to inspire a delighted confusion, like when he pushed his empty Slurpee cup into Cara’s hands as a birthday gift.

He would call me “The Reverend,” or “Queen Elizabeth.” One time he found me on Granville, on the way to pick up Danice at Tom Lee Music, where she worked at the time, and he told me his theory that Tom Lee, the founder, did not actually exist, in the same way that Howard Hughes was a fake figurehead for a corporation. Another time he was preparing an entry for the “Hope in Shadows” photography contest, and he asked if he could take photo of me playing my guitar. He carefully staged the shot by placing a wagon, a bottle of oil, and a fire extinguisher next to me, ever the artist, never telling me what any of it was supposed to mean. Another night, he found me on the beach with some friends, and when I confessed that I was breaking the law by drinking a beer on the beach, he put his hand on my shoulder and told me he’d pray for me.

Robyn would give me beautiful cards for special events, handwritten in his scrawling, all-caps, ballpoint pen flourish. They were often archaically sappy messages, fitting for someone living up to a last name like “Livingstone,” for example, “Dearest Beth, Happiest of birthdays for ever, for eternity,” or “All my love, past, present and future,” or one time, in an uncharacteristically childlike turn, “You are one of my bestest friends of all time.” 

As he spouted his quirky stories, or hammed it up as a self-proclaimed tour guide when we were en route somewhere, you’d catch a half-wink, a twinkle in his eye, as if your entire conversation were an elaborate inside joke. He’d evade most questions about his upbringing, but if he had endured some unspeakable trauma (as so many DTES residents had), he had built a wall and found a surprisingly harmless, even benevolent, coping mechanism. It was as though he’d committed so strongly to the theatre that he’d assigned himself the part of “eccentric, loveable drifter” for life, and you’d only catch him breaking character for a millisecond here and there, with a sly half-smile.

Or maybe there was no deep pain for him to cover, maybe he simply felt his past life was irrelevant to the myriad of experiences awaiting him in the present, so he seized the day and kept moving his body to the place where he could witness and add to the creativity of his community. Sometimes I wondered whether every strange mannerism or off-hand comment he performed in my presence was crafted with the sole purpose of brightening and weirdening my day, a theory that I hope has more to say about Robyn’s overflowing generosity than about my own self-centeredness.

COVID brought the cancellation of most community gatherings, which meant that over the last 2 years, I didn’t have the pleasure of running into Robyn. I’m sad about that. I was so grateful to hear that last night, as he took his final breaths, he was surrounded by friends who read him poetry and sang his favourite song to him. (It was “Hey Jude” – he loved the Beatles. In his last card to me, he wrote out the lyrics to “Strawberry Fields Forever,” a reference to my strawberry blond hair.)

I wish I could have seen Rockin’ Robyn one more time, one more opportunity to share all my love for him, “past, present and future.” In my sanctified imagination, he’s throwing the door over me in the next life, eyes twinkling, scolding me for what I’ve already missed, backpack brimming with all the information I need to join him in making the most of every new day.