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One evening Colonel Creighton invited me over. We sat at the counter dividing the kitchen from the dining room. The overhead lights were off, the counter lit instead by lamps with colored lampshades on long ropes that hung down from the ceiling. On the way from the city to Menlo Park, the colonel had stopped to buy some of the huge Pacific Ocean crabs that the locals called Dungeness. Now we were engaged in something that would baffle any onlookers: after wrapping the crabs tightly in a white cloth, we were mercilessly beating them with wooden mallets on the marble countertop. What we were doing was quite simple: we had to separate the delicious crab meat from the hard shell.
We accompanied the crabs, I concede, with a Californian white wine: Creighton’s wine cellar boasted a rich col
