TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

One of the pleasures of work is that lunch lends an air of festivity to the noon-time hour.There are friends who eschew leftovers, for reasons that are not entirely clear, but I am not one of those people, nor are most of the people who turn to me for guidance and comfort.

Given that soup has been both on my mind and on the table recently, a week ago I poured some Tuscan Bean and Vegetable soup in a red plastic cup (the kind one uses in high school for field parties), covered it with foil and then bagged 14 or so Wheat Thins to accompany the soup.

I was looking for Tupperware, a red plastic cup not being the preferred method of transporting soup, but the only available containers were too small for an adequate lunch and too large for a reasonable one. Thus the red cup and foil, a precarious package to begin with.

Do you place the cup of soup in the cupholders -- shaky in a 1991 GMC pickup -- or do you lean it against the back of the seat and balance it between the towel and the bag of bags I keep ready for bagging emergencies?

Last Tuesday, in addition to lunch, I was carrying biking clothes, biking cleats, a helmet, as well as a bike.

My hands were more occupied than normal because of the desire to make one trip to the truck rather than two.

That is to say there was a flurry of activity loading the truck. It was only after I had driven two blocks that I realized the red cup of soup and the Ziploc bag of Wheat Thins were not in the front seat. Then I remembered: Before opening the truck door, I had placed the soup and crackers on top of the truck and then driven off.

I pulled over, put the truck in park, opened the door and looked on top. Nothing. Clean, or as clean as a truck can be parked under Liquidambars that continue to shed dry leaves and sticker balls.

Seeing somebody drive down the street with a cup of soup and a bag of Wheat Thins on top of the cab must be a sight.

"Look, Daddy -- that man has a cup of soup on the top of his truck," a toddler out on a morning walk might say.

I stepped in the truck and executed a U-turn and, within 40 feet, spotted the red cup and the bag of Wheat Thins. The soup had spattered over a good portion of the intersection of A and 20th, just in case anyone saw it.

I looked at the soup as one might size up a crime scene. What is one's responsibility, especially since the soup evoked images of an evening gone awry after a late-night escapade with too many other red cups. I looked up at the sky. We have a healthy bird population in our neighborhood and if I were a bird, I would consider a delicious Italian soup strewn on asphalt as an offering from above.

My options were limited. Sweeping is not an option, and my truck is not a water truck. I could retrieve the red cup and bag of crackers, which I did, and assume that the soup might teach passers-by a lesson about the dangers of drinking too much after an order of potato wedges and buffalo wings.

I drove home, filled another red cup with soup, drove to work with the cup sitting next to me on the seat, and put it in fridge. At lunch, I put the cup of soup in the microwave for two minutes. When I opened the door, the red cup, like the Wicked Witch of the East, had melted and shrunk to half its size, and the soup was pooling around the base on the glass plate.

Lunch was Wheat Thins.

These are the opinions of Herb Benham, not necessarily those of The Californian.