Night Of The Meek

New Year's Eve.

For most a night of rowdy parties and a time to celebrate the new year.
For me a time of reflection on the past year. What it also becomes is a time for a new beginning, a time when the old is remembered and discarded for the new and the fresh.

This is the last few hours of 2006 and as I type this it is 2007 in half of the world already. 2006 has been pretty well documented for me in this past year's blog, it has had its good and bad. It has had some very good times and very bad. I guess you can't have one without the other.

I expect better from 2007 though. I expect new beginnings and opportunities. I expect more from myself. I expect myself to quit whining as much and to take more action. I expect to break my own barriers. I simply expect more from myself than what I have given so far.

If you are a regular reader of my blog then you also know that a lot of times my titles have more than one meaning. This is indeed the case this time as well.

Night Of The Meek not only represents your humble writer but it also represents one of the best TV episodes ever written for one of the best shows to ever grace the TV screen.

The Twilight Zone.

Night Of The Meek featured Art Carney as Mr. Henry Corwin. A very down on his luck seasonal Santa Claus on skid row. The episode opens with Mr. Corwin in a bar after a handful of shots and a sandwich. He is due back at the store as his liquid lunch is over with. He laments to the bartender about why there is no real Santa and why children have to go without during the season. He staggers out of the bar and is set upon by two children who proceed to beg him for toys as he embraces them and starts to weep.

Back at the store he arrives to a large line of folks who have been waiting on him and an angry store manager who berates him as a drunk. He sits uncomfortably upon his chair as a pushy mother with an ungrateful kid are thrust upon him. He accommodates the rather large child before falling off of his chair with the kid above him yelling at everyone that Santa is drunk. The mother is very agitated and complains to the manager that she will never spend another penny in the store.

All of this sets up one of the best monologues in TV history as I will endeavor to capture here.
The store manager has just fired Henry Corwin and called him a drunk.

This stops Corwin in his tracks, he turns and approaches Mr. Dundee and proceeds:

Henry Corwin - Thank you very much Mr. Dundee. As to my drinking this is indefensible and you have my abject apologies. I find of late that I have very little choice in the matter of expressing emotions. I can drink or I can weep and drinking is so much more subtle.

Mr. Dundee - Will you please leave!

Henry Corwin - But as for my insubordination I was not rude to the woman! Someone should remind her that Christmas is more than barging up and down department store aisles and pushing people out of the way.

Mr. Dundee - Now Corwin!

Henry Corwin - Someone has to tell her that Christmas is another thing finer than that! Richer. Finer. Truer. And it should come with patience and love. Charity. Compassion. That is what I would have told her if she had given me the chance.

Dundee proceeds to ask him how everyone will live up to these standards.

Henry Corwin - I don't know how to tell you Mr. Dundee. I don't know at all. All I know is that I'm an aging, purposeless relic of another time and I live in a dirty rooming house on a street filled with hungry kids and shabby people where the only thing that comes down the chimney on Christmas Eve is more poverty! You know another reason why I drink Mr. Dundee? So that when I walk down the tenements I can really think it is the North Pole and the children are elves and I'm really Santa Claus bringing them a bag of wondrous gifts for all of them!

I just wish Mr. Dundee just one Christmas....Only ONE....that I could see some of the hopeless ones, and the dreamless ones....just on one Christmas, I'd like to see the meek inherit the Earth, and that is why I drink Mr. Dundee and that is why I weep....

And so that ends one of the best and most overlooked moments in TV history, as Mr. Corwin exits the store and heads down his shabby street filled with shabby and hopeless people.

My friends this post might be a week too late to you but I believe it is appropriate every single day of the year, every year.