CONNECTICUT - A few years back, Mr Joseph DeRuvo Jr made a quick stop at an upscale supermarket to buy eggs and was stopped in the dairy aisle by a store manager. “You’re not wearing shoes,” he recalled the manager saying to him.

He was right. Mr DeRuvo was not wearing shoes. He almost never does.

The employee cited health codes; Mr DeRuvo disputed that he was in violation. The employee made vague references to insurance policies; Mr DeRuvo replied, “More people break their necks with high heels than they ever do going barefoot.”

“A customer is complaining,” the manager finally said, as Mr DeRuvo remembers it. “We’d like you to leave.”

Mr DeRuvo initially decided to forgo shoes because of agonising bunions, but he has stayed barefoot for reasons that transcend physical comfort. In that time, he has become a litmus test of people’s forbearance and their willingness to tolerate a stranger’s unconventional lifestyle and perhaps even try to understand it.

There are questions he is asked frequently that he is always happy to answer. How does he manage snow and ice? Doesn’t he get sharp objects stuck in his thick calluses? But that’s the simple stuff. “Navigating the terrain is easy,” Mr DeRuvo said. “Navigating people is tricky.”

When asked to leave a shop or a restaurant, he normally does so without protest, said Mr DeRuvo’s wife, Ms Lini Ecker, a shoe-wearer who serves as a bridge between her husband and a world that generally asks for conformity.

“When someone has put on their ‘I’m in charge persona’,” she said, “once they start, they can never change their minds.”

On occasion, Mr DeRuvo pushes back. “If I’m feeling feisty,” he said.

The egg excursion was one of those times. Mr DeRuvo argued with the manager for a few moments and then walked away and bought his eggs.

For two decades, Mr DeRuvo, 59, has lived an almost entirely barefooted life, one he has constructed, with Ms Ecker’s help, to limit or avoid such confrontations. After years spent as a photographer and a photography teacher, he is still self-employed, now as a Pilates instructor, a particularly barefoot-friendly profession. And the couple stays close to home. When they go out, they gravitate toward mom-and-pop stores and restaurants where they can forge personal connections with owners and managers, and he can be seen as more than the guy with the feet.

Still, said Ms Ecker, 61, “we get thrown out of a lot of places”.

Sympathy for dogs

It was an unseasonably warm day in February when Mr DeRuvo headed out for a short run. The weather was a welcome respite from the record-setting wind chill of the previous week. While hot days can be more challenging than cold ones, with the sun-baked pavement forcing him to run on the painted centreline or in the shadows cast by telephone poles, nothing is as painful underfoot as chemically treated, ice-melting salt. “It gives me a lot of sympathy for dogs,” he said.

Mr DeRuvo’s lifestyle has given him reason to think a lot about bare feet, assessing their safety and hygiene and whether they threaten polite society. He can come up with no health risk. What germs can his feet carry that the bottom of someone’s shoes do not? (Connecticut has no regulations banning customers with bare feet at stores or restaurants, Mr Christopher Boyle, a Department of Public Health spokesman, said, “but retail establishments can set their own rules”.)

And he knows when to capitulate, he said, keeping a pair of loose-fitting sandals in the car in case there is an event where others would be inconvenienced by him getting refused entry, like when they go to dinner with friends.

But generally Mr DeRuvo chooses the comfort of his feet over doing anything or going anywhere that forces him to force them into a pair of shoes.

‘People get skeeved’

Bare feet outside of the beach, the yoga studio or the pedicure chair tend to attract attention. “Shoeless Joe” Jackson was infamous for conspiring to fix the 1919 World Series, but legend has it, it was playing a game barefoot because of blisters that gave him his enduring nickname. Britney Spears’ visit to a gas station in 2004 became a global news event when paparazzi captured her leaving the bathroom in soles al fresco.

“People have a thing about feet,” Mr DeRuvo conceded. “People get skeeved.”

Mr DeRuvo’s look like they would hurt inside a pair of shoes: His big toes, with a protruding large bump at their bases, jut aggressively toward the pinkie toes on a diagonal.

The bumps are bunions. About 20 years ago, they had become painful – throbbing during long runs in tight sneakers and interfering with his life. Mr DeRuvo saw a doctor who recommended surgery. As he awaited the scheduled procedure, he went without shoes because the pain was so intense. In the intervening days he learned that the screws that were to be implanted in his feet contained a metal he was allergic to. He also realised that he felt better since he quit shoes.

It did not take long before he came to see that going barefoot was enriching his life in ways he did not anticipate. There were physical benefits in addition to the relief for the bunions: He found comfort from the ground beneath him. “The tactile feedback just kind of makes everything else going on feel a little bit smoother,” he said.

There are spiritual benefits too, said Mr DeRuvo, a religious man. “God says to Moses, ‘Take off your sandals, you know, this ground is holy,’” he said. “Well, I kind of like to take that as far as it can go.”

‘People don’t like to be reminded that they’re animals’

Mr DeRuvo was born in New York. His mother was a nurse at Bellevue Hospital. His father worked in the print shop at B. Altman, the department store, eventually overseeing the mail-order catalogs.

In the mid-1980s, he enrolled at New England School of Photography in Boston. There, he met Ms Ecker. They have been mostly inseparable since and married in 1987.

He does not remember exactly when he took off his shoes for the last time. “It was about five years before the iPhone,” he said (which would make it roughly 2002).

His children don’t remember a big pronouncement that Dad would be abstaining from shoes, just that their father’s footwear grew increasingly minimal. “Somewhere along the way, something turned and he didn’t trust shoes anymore,” said Mr Nate De Ruvo, 33, a barista in Boston.

As a child, Mr Nate had a general awareness that his father was greeted with suspicion by strangers. “It was clear he violated a social contract, but it didn’t make any sense why that one in particular was so embedded into people,” he said.

He once asked his father why people got so upset. “People don’t like to be reminded that they’re animals,” he said his father told him. “They don’t like to admit we’re not that different from any of the other creatures walking around.”

Ms Ecker was unfazed when asked how her husband’s shoelessness has limited their life. “You take the whole package when you marry someone,” she said with a shrug as she ate lunch with him at the Norwalk Art Space cafe, her clogs nestled under the table next to his toes.

As for Mr DeRuvo, he says that living without his shoes has let him be the person God wishes him to be. “Unless you see someone who is ‘different’ but is still able to cobble together a life,” he said, “you don’t know it’s possible.” NYTIMES