Naturally enough, I turned out to be a lousy boxer. As soon as the other boy banged me in the face a couple of times, I cried. That pretty well sums up my lifelong attitude toward confrontation. I have never been very good at it. In fact, I tend to try to avoid it.

That probably accounts for my aversion to games, my lack of interest in winning and a general desire to go hide somewhere when the going gets nasty. It's not exactly that I'm a coward, though I suppose some people would say that. Rather, confrontation takes its toll on my stomach and my psyche.

I remember, for instance, once confronting a New York waiter one night over the amount of the tip I was leaving him. New York waiters (and cab drivers) are in a class by themselves when it comes to confrontations. They engage in them most every day and there is nothing quite so demeaning as being insulted by a New York waiter.

This man, who had taken a very personal dislike to me, snarled in my face. Clearly, I had to respond some way. I did have the presence of mind to retrieve my tip, meager though it may have been, before I left the restaurant, but I couldn't think of anything biting, rude or unpleasant to say. At least not then. But for two weeks afterward I sulked and thought of what I should have said to him. Of course, I didn't, so in the end he won the confrontation.

There have been other such occasions—though, fortunately, none of them have been recent.

Some people enjoy confrontation. They get a real rush out of closing with the enemy, as it were, besting him or her and coming up a winner. Not all of them will admit it, although I do have one friend who does.

Not too long ago she suffered through a nasty time firing someone. It ended in a face-to-face confrontation, sending the fired and angry person out the door. But she pulled it off, so I thought, with a certain note of triumph.

Unlike Donald Trump, I've never fired anyone. I came close once, but while I was summoning my courage for the big encounter, she quit. It may have been a relief to the fired person, but it was an even greater relief to me.

Oddly enough, although there is a lot of hate, anger and controversy in the world today, most of what you could call middle class America does not get involved in face-to-face confrontation very often. It's not so much that we are nice to one another. Rather, it seems to me, it's because we have invented so many ways not to confront one another in ordinary life.

The one "safe" place where we can be outright unpleasant is when we drive our automobiles. Driving on a public thoroughfare tends to make one anonymous. Most cars, after all, look pretty much like most other cars. Most cars, especially those with tinted glass, make it difficult to see what their drivers look like.

So we can cut in, give other drivers the finger, blow our horns noisily and be generally insulting without much fear of getting involved in a confrontation.

Of course, every now and then one of these road-rage encounters turns out to be dangerous or even deadly, so I am not advocating misbehavior in a car as a means of resolving your need for a confrontation. But bear it in mind when someone does it to you.

They're confronting you rather than their wife or perhaps their employer or even the waiter who insulted them because of the tip they didn't leave.

And think about what it would be like if everyone rode horses instead of driving cars. I'll bet confrontations on the public roadway would be considerably fewer.