Lobster for $4.95 a pound. This weekend only. Live Maine lobster."

I think it was the grocery-store manager who made the announcement. At least he was the person handing out the lobsters when I was finally able to push my cart through produce and venture into seafood.

As lobsters go, they weren't giants: mostly 1 1/4 -pounders, not a whole lot bigger than a jumbo crab. But here they were -- dozens of them wriggling on a bed of ice, their claws banded shut, their bodies a dark bluish-green color that needed about 10 good minutes of steaming to turn a more appetizing bright orange-red.

I could only marvel that lobsters have become so commonplace that you can buy them on sale at Super Fresh. When I was a child, it was a rare treat -- treasures wrapped in seaweed and rushed home from a downtown seafood market. Few of my first-grade classmates had ever even seen one, alive or otherwise.

I know this because I often saved up lobster shells from Sunday dinners during the summer and took them to show and tell at Randle Highlands Elementary School in Southeast Washington. They always impressed the crowd, especially the girls. They could scarcely believe I'd eaten one of these buggy-looking creatures.

But I had. My father saw to that. A Maine native, he introduced us to the pleasures of lobster at an early age. He was active in the Maine State Society of Washington and a local organization of Bowdoin College alumni. Whenever either group got together, they ate lobster. We were almost always in attendance.

Do you know that a lobster has two types of claws -- a pincer and a crusher? Or that the little white film on cooked lobster meat is their flavorless congealed blood? Or that you can tell the gender of a lobster by looking behind its first pair of swimmerets (the tiny little leg fins beneath the tail)?

I learned lobster the way a native Marylander learns blue crab -- their proper handling, the best ways to cook them and, most importantly, how to extract their succulent meat. Like crabs, lobster was a summer treat and its preparation and presentation every bit as ritual-filled.

We steamed lobster in one of those giant lobster pots that Baltimoreans associate with crab feasts. They were always served with a few dozen steamers -- also known as soft-shell clams -- and with sweet corn. It was a whole boiled dinner.

The kids wore those silly plastic bibs. Over dinner, we'd debate the best-tasting part of the lobster -- the kids liked the claws, the parents the tail.

The best specimens were what we called chicken lobsters but are now promoted as "new-shell" lobsters by marketers in Maine. They are lobsters that have recently shed, and their new shells are so thin that you don't need a nutcracker; you can break them apart in your hands. They usually aren't available until July but are worth the wait.

Now, take a hunk of steaming lobster meat, stick it on a fork, swirl it in melted butter and pop it in your mouth. What an amazingly rich and satisfying moment. You can keep your caviar, your goose liver, even your steamed No. 1s. That's just the greatest taste sensation in the world. You will never convince me otherwise.

I can only hope that some of those Super Fresh lobsters were treated with the same reverence our family had for them 35 years ago. And maybe, just maybe, there were some kids who carefully pieced their lobster shells back together after dinner and took them to show and tell.

Geez, did you eat that thing?

You bet I did.