Finding a place to live on campus or in neighboring Palo Alto could be difficult, so Stanford provided a housing clearinghouse for new transfer students about a week before classes began, where we were temporarily put up in a dormitory while we looked for longer-term living arrangements. It was also a chance to get acclimated to the college, and to quickly make some new friends among others who were in the same position as ourselves.
 
I took full advantage of everything the clearinghouse offered. This included noticing an attractive blonde among a group of fellow students sitting on the carpet of the dorm’s lounge area playing cards, or some sort of board game.  I asked if I could join, and soon learned the girl’s name was Kathy.  I also found everyone in the group to be enjoyable company, and the five of us quickly began doing a lot of things together.  When we were in the dorm, this included making music—sometimes with me on my guitar leading everyone in singing, and sometimes it was another guy in the group handling things on the piano.

One evening we all piled into my old family hand-me-down Chevy for a jaunt into San Francisco, which Kath, as a native of the Bay Area, already knew fairly well.  Among other things, we all clung to the outside bars of a cable car as it made its way up and down the impossibly steep hills through various neighborhoods down to San Francisco Bay and back.
 
Once back in my car again, we promptly got turned around, and Kath pointed out a side street we could go up and make a three-point turn to reverse direction.

My jaw dropped in disbelief.  “That’s not a street,” I spluttered.  “That’s a wall!”
 
With all four of the other occupants of my car sharing the same delusion that it was a street, I had little choice but to go along with them.  I gingerly made my way up the concrete, and when it came time to attempt to change directions, I eased very gradually into the turn, hoping the car would warn us (by creaks or groans or strange preliminary movements) that it couldn’t possibly do what was being asked of it BEFORE it was fully perpendicular to our original path—and then suddenly flopping onto its side, then its roof, then the other side, and so on all the way down to the bottom.
 
By an arcane quirk of physics that to this day, I have yet to comprehend, we somehow accomplished the maneuver without totaling the car or transforming ourselves into paraplegics, and everyone had a good laugh at my expense.

I got the others in the group back for their razzing on a subsequent day, when I drove us all to Santa Cruz along a winding mountain road of a type that I’d gotten fairly expert on in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, putting an under-powered family sedan with preposterously soft, floaty suspension into curves where the body leaned at maybe a thirty-degree angle while all tires screamed bloody murder, at speeds you would have thought possible only in a full-on racing car.
 
As I negotiated the first curve in this, uh, spirited manner, the piano player dove immediately to the floor.  But Kathy, perched on the front bench seat next to me, simply grinned and told me I’d be a lot of fun to take a ride with in a sports car.
 
My appreciation for her grew considerably.