He was about to accuse me of chutzpah for trying to fit that oversized load into his car, and insist I pay extra for my cargo. I braced myself

A veteran taxi rider in Israel can read a cabbie’s mood in those first few seconds as he pulls up to the curb, rolls down his window, and shouts, “Hizmant, geveret? You ordered?”

There are the ones who give you the wide-grinned greeting, who jump out to help you with your packages, and who — whether or not they are wearing a kippah on their heads — regale you with divrei Torah and their thoughts on the meaning of life in the inimitable Israeli cabbie way. The ones who, when your container of rainbow sprinkles falls out of your grocery bag and spills thousands of teeny tiny impossible-to-remove balls of sugary confetti all over the trunk, assure you, “Don’t worry, I like candy!” (Not that this ever happened to me.)

And then there are the unmistakable signs that you have the other kind of driver. You can tell from the miniscule muscle movements in his expressionless face. The way his eyes take in your too-full shopping cart, then glance at you, standing next to it in guilty ownership, and his mouth contracts in the slightest of frowns. The way he stares, grim and unresponsive, at your hopeful, cheery hello, and the way his eyes narrow as he watches, motionless, from his rearview mirror, very definitely not offering to help, as you struggle to bump your too-full cart over the curb to reach his trunk, all the while praying that the cart doesn’t slam into his bumper and scratch the paint.

And all you can do, if you’re a sensitive American female, is cower inside and hope that the tongue lashing won’t be too harsh. Because, whether it’s your audacity in trying to fit a stroller into the trunk on top of your groceries, or the way you close the trunk with insufficient gentleness, you know that you’re going to do something wrong.