Oh the shame ...

No one ever said that parenting was easy. I tried to do a good job, and for the most part I will take credit for succeeding.

I taught my son and daughter to appreciate each other and to this day they remain very close friends.

I believe I have instilled in them a sense of right and wrong. I am very proud of both my son and my daughter, and their sense of the right thing to do, such as volunteering to work at the call center for the Hope for Haiti Now telethon.

I have nurtured a proper love of all things Disney in both of them, In fact, both of them have worked in Walt Disney World, and my daughter still works there today.

 

They have developed my love of both musical theater and music in general, and have performed with me in many community theater productions.

 

 

Both of them have developed the proper love of baseball and are NY Mets fans - properly eschewing the hated crosstown NY Yankees. I have taught my son the joys of playing the best position on the field - catcher ... a position he excelled in.

So where did I go wrong? Where does the shame come from? I'll tell you. When my son was young, I wanted to expose him to hockey as played in the National Hockey League. As a NY Rangers fan, I would have liked to have brought him to Madison Square Garden to see a Rangers game, but as we had recently moved to Staten Island, it was so much easier to go to the arena at the Meadowlands in NJ, home of the New Jersey Devils ... the Rangers rival team. (Anyone who knows NYC geography knows that Staten Island is practically in NJ and would be a part of NJ if not for an 18th century boat race in which NY State won Staten Island as the prize.)

When I got to the box office I asked for the best available tickets, and received two ducats for the second row off the ice, right next to the penalty box. The view was amazing and my son immediately fell in love with the game. Unfortunately he also started rooting for the Devils ... especially since his friends were Devils fans as well.

When the Rangers and the Devils met in the 1994 playoffs, we each watched in our own respective rooms, sending messages back and forth on the dog's collar. (The Rangers won that game and went on to win the Stanley Cup thank you very much.)

We have attended a number of Rangers/Devils games in the following years, but I am sad to report that in those years, his Devils have outperformed my Rangers, who have not won the Stanley Cup since 1994. (It was more than 50 years since they had won their last one prior to 1994.)

So it is with a small amount of guilty pleasure that I am enjoying the fact that this year the Rangers will make the NHL playoffs, but my son's New Jersey Devils - for the first time in 14 years - will not.

I guess every parent is allowed one major failure.

Oh the shame ...