Hunting Park: Cleanliness is Next to Godliness

Ramon Pasquez is so busy during the week that he had to pick the coldest, rainy day to wash his car.

Parked outside on 7th Street, Ramon is scrubbing and rinsing, section by section, his white pick up truck that has visibly been stained with dirt and mud. The truck bed is still full of the things Pasquez collects daily while on his jobs. Anything from a car engine to a lawn chair is situated in the bed of his truck, and he has no intention on cleaning that part.

"No, I'm not cleaning the bed because it just going to get dirty again when I put all the stuff back," says Ramon. "I pick up peoples unwanted junk and do a lot of handy work for people who need me."

As shocking as it was that he was washing his car in the rain, Pasquez had no problems with dipping his hands into the, what could have been, freezing cold water and scrubbing down his truck.

Ramon claims, "I am so busy that I forget to clean so today because its raining, I don't have many jobs to do, so I clean it."

With no one else to help, Pasquez dips his hands in the bucket and start on the driver's side door. He scrubs and cleans until the soap suds are a deep rich brown color, then he takes his water hose and runs it over the side of the car.

"I need the water hose so I can see what I missed. If i'm just cleaning, cleaning, cleaning and not looking I could be missing something," says Pasquez.

With no end of the rain in sight, Ramon must keep working. He is already in too deep to stop now unless the weather pattern changed and suddenly there was a thunder storm, but because it is simply rain, Ramon keeps on.

Ramon says, "It has to get done. What was I supposed to do? This truck is dirty."
As cars drive past and his neighbors are making their way home from work and school, Ramon still scrubs and wipes away at his truck in hopes that by the next day, it will sparkle like its brand new.

"You can't let this stuff sit on your car, its dirty and nasty. I can't do business like that," jokes Pasquez who uses his truck for all business.

Pasquez, who refers to himself as a 'handy man', can fix dry wall; lighting, roofs, windows, doors, he can change oil and a flat tire. A modern jack of all trades is what Ramon is and he takes so much pride in what he can do that, in the middle of the coldest afternoon in almost two weeks, Ramon is out washing his car in the rain.

"It's got to get done. Who else is going to do it for me? You?" questions Ramon and at the inkling that I was going any manual labor, I said my goodbyes and went on about my day while Ramon went back to scrubbing down his Ford F150.

Whitney Crawford, Group 28, Hunting Park