By Stuart Mitchner

Driving into Philadelphia Friday, we’ve got music on the stereo, as always. The day began with rain, it’s still overcast as we cross the Delaware on I-95, and the CD we’re listening to is powerfully upbeat and melodic with strong singing. The songs have titles like “Sky High,” “Lonely Lonely Love,” and “High and Dry,” with typical love-song lyrics and shameless rhymes like “fishes” and “this is.” It’s a British group, Jigsaw, from the 1970s, and my son, who rescued them from rock’n’roll oblivion, will tell you they “should have made it big.” Anyway, about five miles into Pennsylvania one of the songs backs into beauty, bringing tears to my eyes and changing the course of the day and the subject of this column.

Whether it’s Jigsaw or Gershwin, Bach or the Beatles, or Rodgers and Hammerstein, music can take you out of an ordinary moment (traffic intensifying as we near the outskirts of the city) and force you face to face with an event you thought you’d moved beyond. What’s come out of nowhere and caught me by the throat is the death of a neighbor we’d known for almost 30 years. I’ve had plenty of time to absorb the news, I thought I had, but all I’d done was walk around it. I hadn’t seen Marion face to face for months, and most of our contacts over the years had been the routine next-door-neighbor variety, as when one or the other is out of town, you take in the mail and the paper, water plants, turn on and off lights, feed the cats. It was different with my wife because she and Marion had had long, more than casual talks.

A Burial Ground

After I drop my son off at the Philadelphia Record Exchange (no relation to its renowned Princeton namesake), I find a parking spot on Frankford Avenue and prowl around the strange neighborhood thinking about the woman who lived next door. By now the sun is out and it’s feeling more like summer than spring. After passing through a small, pretty park where tulip trees are blooming, I come to the sprawling gloomy chaos of an urban cemetery of crooked gravestones where the winter is still bleakly and grimly in evidence. It’s a devastated spot, the bare trees looming pale and twisted, worthy of a place of creepy honor on the grounds of the House of Usher. That Poe comes to mind is to be expected since he once lived in the same general area, down on Sixth and Spring Garden.

As I was to learn at Saturday’s memorial service, even as I was peering through the iron bars of Palmer Cemetery (also known as the Kensington Burial Ground), Marion was being buried next to her husband Demos in a plot at Princeton Cemetery. They had been married at the Princeton University chapel in 1957. He died in 2002. The last time I’d seen Demos was to witness the signing of his will. The first and last time I gave Marion a real hug (as opposed to a hello/goodbye one) was in the hallway just outside the room where Demos was already clearly sinking into the terminal mindset, unaware of the slideshow of family scenes repeating themselves on a computer screen that no doubt included images of the three Bakoulis daughters at play with their friends on our street, Laurel Circle.

“Our House”

It seems that some form of music is always playing in my head, usually without being consciously tuned in, no devices, no headset, and half the time I don’t know what the song is until I find myself whistling or humming it. Back in the epicenter of winter, around the time Marion slipped and fell on the icy driveway as she was going to the mail box, the song that wouldn’t leave me alone was “Our House,” off the 1970 Crosby Stills Nash & Young album, Deja Vu. I never owned the LP, never thought much of the song except that close friends of ours in the U.K. seemed always to be playing it when we were over there. One reason it may have been on my mind this past February was that we’d been asking ourselves how much longer we could afford to live in our “very very very fine house,” with Princeton’s very very very over-the-top property taxes.

This is why our neighbors and our neighborhood were on my mind as CSNY’s “Our House” was following me around, with its rare-for-rock vision of domestic tranquility, “I’ll light the fire, you place the flowers in the vase that you bought today.” And there we all are “staring at the fire for hours and hours” listening to “love songs all night long” or in the cozy room with windows lit by sunshine, and here comes the irresistible chorus, “Our house is a very very very fine house with two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard, now everything is easy ‘cause of you.” It’s sung by Graham Nash somewhere on the human side of ethereal. The back story is it was written when he was living with Joni Mitchell in a place they were sharing in Laurel Canyon, which could lessen its universal appeal, but come to think of it, we live on Laurel Circle, so there we are.

An Everyday Situation

What makes Marion’s death hard to accept let alone think about is the ordinary everyday situation of a neighbor doing what we all do six days a week when we go to the mailbox to get the mail. But Marion slipped on the ice, fell, hit her head, and no one saw it happen. And no one, it appears, could have saved her. After a seemingly successful six week rehabilitation at the Medical Center, she was home and I saw her walking with an aide up and down our street. Only a day or two later her eldest daughter called with the news.

The chorus of “Our House” won’t leave me alone. Asked about the song, Graham Nash said it came “out of an incredibly ordinary moment that many, many people have experienced.” An interesting contradiction in terms “incredibly ordinary” — the song became meaningful to “so many people,” as Nash knows, by making an ordinary moment extraordinary.

“All Who Live in Love”

Marion’s life was remembered by the rector at All Saints as “a work of art,” which applies as well to a service that began with the singing of Alexa Cottrell, who could hardly be seen from where I was sitting, creating the effect of music coming from a virtually invisible source. Since the composer of the music was not identified in the program, the mystery seemed as much a part of the service as the Bach Prelude and Postlude and the eulogies from family members, among them Marion’s brother Stanley Bergen, who remembered his younger sister as a little girl living and playing on Princeton Avenue, near Aiken; he also recalled her fondness in later years for the music from Camelot, which she saw when it opened on Broadway starring Julie Andrews and Richard Burton.

The Mystery Solved

The last hymn Saturday was sung to Beethoven, the Hymn to Joy, with words written by Princeton resident Henry VanDyke (1852-1933): “all who live in love are thine; teach us how to love each other, lift us to the joy divine.”

After contacting the All Saints Church, I learned that the music sung by Alexa Cottrell was Die Jesu or “Prayer to the Good Jesus for Everlasting Rest” from Fauré’s Requiem.

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One of my first stories for Town Topics (“A Hard Day’s Night Gone Right: Laurel Circle Makes History,” May 5, 2004) was about a gas leak that gave Laurel Circle the distinction of being the first and only neighborhood in the history of Princeton Township to have been evacuated. Given the late hour and the fact that no one had time to get dressed, the scene in the main Meeting Room at Township Hall (as it was known in those days) turned into “a pajama party,” according to Sgt. Sean Reed. The only exiles from the meeting room were three dogs and their three male owners, who had to wait out the hours in a less comfortable area. It’s fitting that the only cat who made the trip came with Marion, whose extended feline family included Samantha and Tom, Albert, Fleetie, and daughter Julie’s 13-year-old tortoise shell Jade, who clung to a fireman while Julie’s 4-year-old daughter Leah was clinging to Julie. Jade eventually allowed herself to be disengaged from her protector and put into a carrier.

This neighborhood event happened between 1:30 and 4 a.m. on Communiversity eve 2004.