‘I love you on the sidewalk; I love you on the wall’

This Valentine’s story starts with graffiti and ends with the universal language of love.

It comes from Pete Sencevicki of Bluffton. He’s best known around here as the acoustic bass player who started the Dixieland Jazz Society of the Lowcountry. That was more than 20 years ago, and it still offers free shows from 2 to 5 p.m. on the last Sunday of the month at The Jazz Corner.

Pete called me the other day and left a voice message. He was reading a poem.

It was the first poem he ever wrote. It dates from his high school days, walking to school in a ghetto neighborhood of Russian and Polish immigrants.

He’s 84 now, but what he saw that day has never faded. He especially remembers it on Valentine’s Day.

It’s odd that Pete ended up with a love affair for words pieced together in poetry. His parents had emigrated from Russia and, when he started school in South River, N.J., he didn’t speak a word of English.

Actually, he knew one word. It was the word his older sister drilled into his head.

The school of hard knocks had taught her it was the most important single word to know if you can’t speak the language at school. His sister taught him a very practical word: “Bathroom!”

Pete grew up to become a teacher and would end up writing a book about the lessons of a single word.

But on this day, Pete was just starting high school, and his walk to school took him past an elementary school.

He saw a little boy outside waiting for school to start. He had a stolen piece of chalk in his hand, and he was scrawling words on the sidewalk and on a wall.

The little boy was professing his love for a girl named Mary.

“I kept on walking,” Pete recalls from that day almost 70 years ago. “But it stuck with me, and I formed a poem from it in my head.”

He has since written a lot of whimsical poems about a life that, at one time, had him driving a Volkswagen Beetle with a bass violin sticking out the window.

He recited this poem on the phone as another Valentine’s Day rolled around.

I Love You

I love you on the sidewalk;

I love you on the wall;

I love you written by some kid

Who knows not love at all.

Of course it’s just a playful kid so ...

I love you on the sidewalk;

I love you on the wall;

All because I fell in love,

I’m just a kid, that’s all.

Pete sealed his poem in an envelope a few years ago and gave it to Gretta on Valentine’s Day. They’ve been married 44 years.

The poem lives as proof that Pete not only learned America’s language, but the universal language as well.

“I loved you when I met you,” he told Gretta, “and I still do.”

This story was originally published February 13, 2017 at 2:24 PM with the headline "‘I love you on the sidewalk; I love you on the wall’."