Two lasting commuter-related images from Halloween 2007:

1. The kid leaving Hawthorne Elementary in a spot-on Metro-North train car costume. It was perfect–a box around his torso painted with precise detail to look like a Metro-North car. Fittingly, it was the blue Harlem line.

I know, I know, time to get a damn camera phone. I was tempted to ask the kid’s parents to email me a picture of him, but those are the sort of requests that start with angry looks and end with you being questioned by detectives in dank, foul-smelling interrogation rooms.

2. The heavy-set…no, she was fat…woman with receding gums accompanying her young trick-or-treating daughter on our doorstep last night.

“I see you every morning…riding your bike or walking to the train…,” the woman said.

I shrugged sheepishly. “Yeah, that’s me,” I think I said.

“Every time I see you,” she continued, “I think, good for you!”

Uh, thanks.