NorthsideWilliamsburg, the location of my next seizure, is a completely different world from the East Williamsburg of Flushing and Broadway. Polish and a few Russian immigrants predominate. If you were to walk from one neighborhood to the other, you could take Graham Avenue, a.k.a. the Avenue of Puerto Rico, a bustling shopping street festooned with the colorful merchandise of clothing, discount and variety stores, piled onto the crowded sidewalk. In summer the street has a carnival atmosphere. Storefront hawkers armed with microphones, ice cream trucks spinning out tinny jingles and the ever-present salsa music-- escaping from apartment windows, blaring from radios placed on the sidewalk and booming from the extra bass of passing car stereos-- combine in a mad din. Once across Grant Street you enter the quieter and older Italian neighborhood. Avenue of Puerto Rico yields to Via Vespucci and groups of people dragging young ones in tow, strollers and shopping carts in front, and clutching parcels and bags to their bodies, become old men enjoying the pleasures of a stoop and a cheap cigar.

A feature of the neighborhood that makes every walk worthwhile are the symbolic signs hung out in front of the business establishments-- a coffee cup at the coffee shop, a hammer outside the hardware store, a bull's head at the butcher's-- it makes me think of a medieval guild town. Between Grand and Metropolitan you pass a bar, complete with a massive frosty stein above the door, where I like to stop in for a drink. At the time of my first seizure, when I was teaching, my friend Jose and I would go by after putting recruitment posters up in the Greenpoint projects, before hitting the low-rises further down Graham Avenue at Ten Eyck Street.