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I had stood on the mat. It was a gym class many years ago. Across from me stood my opponent. We were the smallest boys in the class, maybe even the whole school. Around up our classmates huddled up to the mat. Their faces choked into masks of fiery rage were unrecognizable. Encores of "fight, fight, fight," rang off the high ceilings.

Outside a storm raged with sheets of lightening brightening the ink blot darkness giving an erie glow to the waxed gym floor.

As much as I didn't like fighting, I could feel the frenzy rising!

"The best fight, the very best fight," I told thirteen year old Charlie as I crumpled a note about a suspension, "is one that never happened."

"Another parent would have been proud. I sent Ragsy Miller to the nurse's office with fist marks on his face." A misplaced angelic glow was etched on Charlie's face.

I was no stranger to fighting as a boy. I invariably lost. I avoided fights and boys who fought.

Nor was it a problem of first impression as a parent. My older boy Jonathan was no more successful than I, most the time.

The students crowded up to the edge of the mat, screeching as the gym teacher with bulging tattooed muscles held a simple book in his massive hands and calmly turned the pages backwards and forwards and then twisted his head to see if he could read the strange script upside down.

The lights overhead beamed brightly against the darkness of the angry storm raging outside.

I took the brief respite to assay my opponent: short or even shorter than I, but flabby, buckets of smooth flesh hung from his arms. Not a muscle there, I guessed. A good swift move, come up around and behind him, I plotted, he's defenseless, but what if he loses his balance and falls on me - - accidentally.

"But you do have to stand up for yourself?" Charlie defended his actions.

"You do - - with finesse - - better to stand tall by avoiding conflict." I admonished Charlie.

Charlie's older brother Jonathan has so many after school visits to Dr. Malagasy, the neighborhood GP, that the doc offered to teach Jon "Tae Kwan Do - - Philippine style."

"Is that like boxing by Brooklyn Rules?" I asked.

"Worse - - much worse," I was assured.

The gym teacher scratched his empty head and tossed the book in the alien script toward the bleachers. I gasped. I fully expected one of the thunderbolts from the storm raging outside to pierce the roof and strike us all dead. Surely such the book written from right to left had supernatural powers.

The chanting may have stopped as dismayed pupils watched the book thump against the bleachers and fall to the glazed surface of the gym floor.

"The hardest and yet the easiest thing to do," I taught Charlie, "is to walk away from a fight."

With Jon, I merely kept him away from school after some of his major bruisings. There was no sense to send him back for a new bashing. In the office he worked on the computer and learned to master its programming. That was the best form of conflict avoidance I could think of.

Yet I can't honestly say that when the gym teacher with a diabolical grin turned to the combatants on the mat, I had any other thought than swiftly bringing my adversary down.

"Sometimes there is no choice," Charlie snorted.

"I caught you," the teacher, pointing to the other boy, yelled over the thunder claps, "reading that gibberish book and you," the teacher's grimy index finger directed the next accusation, "day-dreaming or asleep. Now you show the class the lesson of the day:" the teacher roared as a clap of thunder broke right outside the high windows of the gym, "how to fight." The teacher held his finger aloft to signal us to get ready.

The yelling of the students ceased: even the crackles of thunder stilled to wait the order to fight.

It just seemed that one day Jon was small and puny and the next he was over 6' tall. The next opponent who picked on him was set on his bottom. Jon didn't go into voluntary exile afterwards onto my computers. He was suspended for an entire week.

"Aren't you going to impose any further punishment?" an imperious school official prated.

"No - - I see no need - - I gather the school did nothing to control fighting when Jon lost, I'll do nothing to stop it when he wins: Perhaps a fair solution might be to avoid fighting entirely."

"Fight," the teacher commanded as he dropped his finger, his face reddened and contorted into a demonic glow.

I looked to the window where lightening flashed, but without a boom or crackle. I looked to my opponent. Nothing happened.

I had my arms swinging at my side at the ready, but my opponent had not stepped toward me, as I would have expected. How could I take him from behind?

We stood, looking at each other in a silent state of truce.

Within a day of the weeklong suspension, I received a call. Jon was invited back to school. The other boy was willing to apologize.

"Unnecessary," I responded, "the fight's over. The books are closed. Why the sudden remission of the punishment?"

"Jon," I was told by an embarrassed voice, "is the only one here who can work the school's computer. We - - need to put out the newspaper or lose our funding."

"Fight," the teacher snarled. "Fight! The loser fails and gets to come back here on the gym floor in the blazing heat of summer."

"We won't," the other boy declared calmly.

"Wont'?" the teacher bellowed. "Both fail."

"You won't do that. Our uncles are lawyers. "Mine," said the other boy, "is a big shot New York City lawyer, he'll sue you."

I looked at the teacher. Rage had melted into astonishment. I looked to the other boy and read the next line off his face.

"Mine - - right - - mine," I replied, "is a Philadelphia lawyer. He'll use - - some big words with the Board of Ed - - and he'll see you fired - - just to get rid of - - unk."

The class and teacher stood stunned around the mat as the war drums of thunder moved off into the distance.

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