Shoes

At 6:55AM, a doorbell woke me up on a Friday morning. The deliveryman from Best Buy was one week late and five minutes early. Half awake and half-dressed, I get up to answer the intercom, letting the man through the lobby, as I hasten myself to get dressed. After carrying out the old fifteen year television set, he began to unpack its thinner descendant with a box cutter. As the shavings of cardboard and packaging tape piled on the floor, my stomach twisted in alarm when I noticed that he was wearing his shoes. It wasn’t that my new rug was potentially tarnished, or that my mother would stumble upon a mess while she was getting ready for work. It was a violation of Russian canon. You do not walk around in a house with shoes.
This rule is common in Japan, the Czech Republic, and Sweden as well.
For the next ten minutes, I was driven impatient in an awkward setting that felt little like my home. I wasn’t going to be impolite. I was aware that he was clueless, but the cultural dimension to my logic found it unreasonable and repulsive to walk around in shoes.