I’m currently in the middle of a two-week world tour, if for “world” you would accept “Denver, Atlanta, and Munich,” punctuated by Boston, Boston, and Boston. When I make frequent trips to and from the airport like this, I prefer to use a car service rather than drive, especially in the winter when I’m likely to arrive at Logan to find my car buried under a four-foot drift of snow.

When I was doing the Chicago-to-Philly commute, the same car service drove me to and from the airport for three years, and I never had a problem with them. When we moved here I thought it would be a piece of cake to find a similarly reliable driver, but I had to use three or four at a time because they were all frequently unavailable.

Finally I found one guy who was there most of the time I called, so I started using him exclusively. I called him “Conspiracy Theory Man.” He told me that he used to work for Big Technology Consulting Company, but he blew the whistle on their shoddy accounting practices, a la Enron, and subsequently he was fired and had to drive to make ends meet. He was waiting for the government to bring its case against BTCC, when he would be vindicated as a hero, but of course the Feds had been bribed to hold off. He was full of ideas about other government plots, on which he held forth at length.

Because he was the only available driver for miles, I held my tongue, until one day he told me with authority that the pharmaceutical companies were sitting on cures for all kinds of diseases, like cancer and AIDS, but they weren’t releasing them because if they CURED disease they would go out of business. Then the absurdity of paying money to listen to this crap hit me, and I snapped and told him that was ridiculous, that the drug companies wouldn’t know they could cure cancer unless they did huge public clinical trials, and that no company would turn down a blockbuster even in the relative short term to preserve the revenue streams of other companies whose drugs treated the same indication. And he got kind of upset that I contradicted him, and after that I was a little scared to be alone in a car with him because the aliens were probably tracking him closely, and so no more Conspiracy Theory man.

When the next spate of winter travel rolled around, I was moved to try my luck in the Yellow Pages again, and I happened upon a car service owned by a nice woman who was usually available to take my bookings. All was well until a new driver, a rather nervous man, picked me up. Or rather, he didn’t pick me up; he sat in the car in front of my house until 15 minutes past the pickup time, when I decided he wasn’t coming and went out to get my own car and noticed him sitting there.

“Weren’t you going to let me know you were here?” I asked when I figured out what had happened.

“I always wait out front until the customer is ready to come out,” he said.

Good to know. Unfortunately my flight was now leaving in an hour and forty-five minutes, and he decided to take the scenic route to the highway. Fifteen minutes later I breathed a sigh of relief–now we could open the throttle, still plenty of time–when he settled into a fifty-three mph pace.

After fifteen more minutes I was a bundle of nerves. “Could you please, uh, drive a little faster? My flight leaves in a little over an hour.”

He boiled over. “Listen, lady,” he began, and then proceeded to castigate me for not coming out to look for him at the appointed time and not planning on arriving at the airport two hours before my flight. I confess I didn’t hear much after “Listen, lady.” We had words, and after my flight landed I called his boss and told her not to bother sending him to pick me up.

So, twice burned, I tried one more listing. He turned out to be the perfect driver. He was always available, always on time, and always courteous, but in a friendly, casual way. He had grown up in Port City and new everyone and everything. Most important, he was one of the few people I could stand to chit-chat with. One night I told him at midnight that I had just fired my housekeeper; by 9:00 a.m. the next morning I had a call from a friend of a friend of his who arranged me to meet the sister of a friend of hers whom I hired later that day. Everything was going splendidly until I e-mailed him about this round of travel. He never e-mailed back.

I called his number. A woman answered and said that she and her husband had taken over his business for six months, because my driver was suffering from exhaustion and had to take a sabbatical. Exhaustion. You know, like Mariah Carey or Liza Minnelli.

Could they take me back and forth to the airport six times in the next two weeks?

They could. So far it’s been working out pretty well. There’s just one small thing; whereas my old driver usually picked me up in a sedan or SUV, the new guy picks me up in a stretch limo. A huge (but yet not particularly luxurious) Cadillac stretch limo. It’s not that I’m complaining that my limo isn’t luxe enough; it’s more the idea of a limo itself. A limo is a poor person play-acting Donald Trump. A limo is to cars what gold lamé is to clothes. When this leviathan turns down our alley to get to our driveway, I can just hear all the good Yankees peering out from their kitchen curtains saying, “Who does she think she is?” (I can hear them saying, that is…I can’t hear them peering.) The juxtaposition of the words “limo” and “alley” pretty much says it all. I am but a trumpery Trump.