Human Up Season 1 Ep 9: Navigating Identity,Community and Education

This is a transcript of Human Up Podcast Season 1, Episode 9 with Melissa Marlon-Maini, which you can watch and listen to here:

Dave Marlon: Welcome to the Human Up Podcast. My name's Dave Marlon, your host, and today it's a huge honor to have Melissa Marlon Maini as our featured guests. Welcome, Melissa.

Melissa Marlon-Maini: Thanks.

Dave: So happy you're here. Now Melissa is a master educator for over 20 years and teaching mostly fourth grade. She's also, you're a black belt and you've taken a variety of courses in mindfulness. You serve on your mosquito abatement commission for like a decade. You've also been the commissioner of the volunteer fire department for how long, Melissa?

Melissa: I think that's 13 years. 13 years. It's not a volunteer department anymore. Now it's paid.

Dave: Now paid. Okay. So a ton of service work there in your community. You're also a wife of coming on 30 years,

Melissa: Something like that,

Dave: And a mom of four amazing boys, and my sister, which is super

Melissa: Special. Right.

Dave: So welcome Melissa.

Melissa: Thank you, David.

Dave: I appreciate you coming on here and having a chat. And to me, if I have my wishes, you and I on our conversations almost always get deep. They get real and raw. So to me, of any guest I've had, I'm kind of most excited to talk to you, really because of the type of relationship we have, which I value so much. Let's open up with a softball. What was it like growing up with Dave?

Melissa:

Funny, funny you should ask. Jenny and I were just talking about that and we blamed you for all the mistakes we made. However, without those little hiccups growing up, like drinking at age 14 and actually drinking blackberry, brandy, she reminded me of why we gave her that. I don't know, just a mistake we learned from those mistakes growing up was exciting. You were the leader. You were absolutely the leader as you still are. We were latchkey kids, so the three of us stuck together and I think you and I, and I'm being the middle child, I went both directions, but I gravitated to the more mature choices that you would make, whether it was sneaking out or going to a party or just building forts on the beach when we were really little. I think my childhood was book worthy.

Dave: I agree, and I am so grateful that you and I, and even Jenny that we're each two and a half years apart because it really allowed some independence, but a closeness as a family union, which granted, it's the only one I know, but to me I have fond memories and it seems like it was perfect,

Melissa: Right? And now that we're older and we can wisely look at other families and notice the way other families work, we could still see what was really great about our family, and I could attest to this conversation in this format today, and where we are both located is proof that our childhood was phenomenal

Dave: Right now despite our mom being a Holocaust survivor who came with her traumas. But to me, I credit mom for my work ethic, I think of all of my childhood. To me, mom was there. So while you and Jenny might blame me for some of the problems, I have no blame for mom. I find mom operated trying to instill integrity, trying to be the best mom always having food, always granted. I underappreciated how hard of a job she had, but I think mom was amazing. What was it like growing up with the child of a Holocaust survivor?

Melissa: Well, obviously the progression of understanding the trauma of Holocaust, of the Holocaust and being a child of someone that survived the Holocaust, there are so many studies now that show the simplest things that we do were impacted. By the way, I believe our mom, she was obviously a survivor. She survived the Holocaust. But the term, if you're a survivor, you're a different person. You do things, you assimilate greater, you're more flexible faster because your life depends on it. And since mom's birth all the way until she was 15, coming to America, she knew to assimilate was the way to go. And so when you're raised with that as your foundation, you do a lot of things that aren't particularly healthy when you're just trying to fit in as quickly as possible without maintaining, building your own core identity and your own value system, which is where I thank our father because I feel as though mom was a boots on the ground. She worked her butt off and that's what she was great at. But it is dad's thinking that allows us to regulate and understand that, wait a minute, am I just responding to this emotion or am I just doing what I've always done? Let's stop and take a deeper look at it. And I think that comes from dad's side. I'm not saying that mom's side doesn't have great intelligence, which is what that comes from, but because of the Holocaust, it was crushed. It was destroyed

Because of the trauma.

Dave: That's so insightful and to me, alright, I got my money's worth already. That was perfect, that understanding. Now you also grew up with dad and when I was writing trying to classify dad, I put businessman.

Melissa: Oh, that's kind. Yeah, yeah. He's a sociopathic criminal as well. And unfortunately society would look at that first because he's Matt Marlon and he was a criminal, however, he was my father. Our father, we loved him dearly. We played hard. We played cards and took walks and talks and you built businesses with him. And I got ideas from him and was always inspired. I realized later in life that I'm not a disappointment because I became just a teacher. I am disappointed in myself if I think I just go to work, I breathe and sleep and dream about teaching.

Dave: You're right. Yeah. You're a teacher.

Melissa: Yes. We were on vacation and I'm like, Ooh, we are playing a game. I'm like, Ooh, this is a great opportunity to teach just a million things from playing. And I believe that that dad was always passionate, extraordinarily passionate about the ideas that he was brewing to make a living as harmful as they were to a community. That's what he did as an entrepreneur.

Dave: And I would actually take back, dad to me was fundamentally a business person. Now I agree. He had sociopathic traits and he engaged in activities that harmed others. However, to me, fundamentally, it was always about whatever business he was doing, and he did have some great talents at seeing businesses, the needs for them, forming them, building them, running them, operating them, which were all things done in a non-criminal fashion. Although anytime something came close to the line, to me, the lines that you and I are encumbered by in part of a legal and as an ethical system, those weren't things that he was encumbered by perhaps due to a sociopathic mind, perhaps due to a diseased perspective. But within that diatribe I just made to me was giving him some credit that he did do, whether it was his car business or his restaurant or his video game manufacturing or fantasy, he fundamentally built a business and was operating it. I remember when he made perfume with a genuine bovine extract that he was so excited by. And there was title companies, there were jewelers, there was so many different businesses.

Melissa: Business, medical supplies, solar panels, heart foundation,

Dave: The mechanical company.

Melissa: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's incredible. It's incredible. It's book worthy

Dave: Now. Agreed, agreed. Now you mentioned you're fundamentally a teacher and you have this, is it called Place-based Learning?

Melissa: Place-based learning? It's quite popular actually. It's probably old at this point. Place-based learning is using the environment that you have to teach.

Dave: Oh, okay. Now I'm a clinician, as you know, and I find experiential therapy is often much more effective and impactful than classroom or group room therapy.

Melissa: Absolutely.

Dave: Is that what place-based is based on?

Melissa: Yeah. Yeah. So you build your curriculum to meet the standards based on, I can only use the examples I use. So I teach a giant fire program with our fire department about our wilderness and the urban wilderness interface that we live in. And so I can teach math, social studies, science, reading, writing, Spanish technology, health, what are the other topics that

Dave: We all are okay. All within that fire prevention.

Melissa: And we're onsite, we're at the fire department, we are in the forest. We have all kinds of incredible, the wealth of knowledge in a fire department is incredible, especially rural because rural fire departments, you might have a team of two, but they know everything they can do. Extraction, repelling, house structure, EMT, paramedic, they're everything. So why not have them teach? So that's the way that works. And you then have the opportunity to show children, this could be your job. They didn't even know these jobs

Dave: Existed.

Melissa: Well play space. And again, I mentioned in my bio that the mosquito bateman, everyone's like the mosquito Bateman, the number one animal that kills people in the world is the mosquito. So let me explain that first. So put it in perspective, there are four people that die by elephants and there are close to 500,000 people a year that die from a mosquito and our scientists on site at the mosquito abatement. And the process of keeping your community safe because of the fire department, mosquito abatement, even the library is another part of a community which is going to nicely cycle into your human up. And the purpose of this whole conversation, because a whole community is, it takes every person to make it whole.

Dave: Right. Wow. What we didn't talk about that I always admired about you is I remember when you first left and you became a sign painter in the Bronx. Could you tell me that story?

Melissa: Sure. You forgot. Okay. So yes, I left the house and attempted college, but I did not have the self, not self-awareness. I didn't have the confidence to go to college. So I went to work and I got an apartment in the Bronx, end of the sixth line off Hutchinson River Parkway, and I got an apartment there and the do the lower level of the apartment is a woman named Dottie Pogi, and she's T signs, and she was a journeyman letterer hand lettering, gold leafing hand lettering. This is 1980, was it 85? 84, 19 84. So hand lettering in the Bronx was like ham, 99 cents a pound. Truck lettering. Boat lettering. There was so many signs, paper signs, supermarket signs. And so she taught me to hand lettering hand letter. I quit my other job, which was I was a bar maid somewhere and I started hand lettering and I loved it.

And then eventually I branched out and moved over the bridge to College Point, had some babies, got married in that order and actually had the one. And I kept hand lettering and I still hand letter, I hand letter many signs in my community inside my building at school murals are on the walls of the local bakery inside the fire department, a massive mural. And I have a plan, which I didn't even mention to hand paint with my son Dylan, who is an artist as actually all my kids are ours, but he could do mural painting, a water tower. So the only thing that's slowing me down is that we are probably going to get another water tower. So I would letter this water tower. Yeah. So I'm a sign painter by trade, however, people use computers now, but sign lettering is an art.

Dave: Oh, that's so beautiful.

Melissa: Yeah. I lettered you inside your house once return with honor.

Dave: You did. I love that in the garage that I came home to each day and it helped me raise my son because it never, almost every lesson that happens in school or bullying or what have you, when come home, the answer is return with honor. So that was beautiful. You also did some signs here in Las Vegas that I would drive up and down the strip and be like my sister hand lettered that.

Melissa: Yeah, yeah. I also did some channel letting on Sierra Health Services on a giant crane and ran the crane into the stucco wall and broke it. And then I learned how to stucco.

Dave: Wow.

Melissa: Yeah, there were several murals, but they finally, this is over 25 years ago that I lettered there. But yeah, I love sign painting.

Dave: That's amazing.

Melissa: It's fun. It's good.

Dave: Boy, we can go so many different directions right now. Let me ask you, your brother, instead of lettering is I'm a journeyman in helping solve homelessness,

Melissa: And

Dave: That's my job right now, as you know. And I work each day to do interventions to get people off the street, to bring people into treatments, to address serious mental illnesses or substance use disorders, which is primarily our challenge. Do you have a homeless issue in your town?

Melissa: Well, there was a homeless that showed up on the corner and everybody stopped and asked, what are you doing? What's going on? What do you need? He wasn't homeless. He lived in an apartment temporarily. He was disabled, and he set up a spot on the corner, right in the corner by the stinker station, the stinker station, and I stopped and immediate, what are you doing? What are you doing? You're going to freeze. You can't park, you can't live here. He had no car. You can't live here. What do you need? He told me his story and he was there for several days just making money to go, to move along. It was just a way for him to make money. I didn't ask if he was a drug addict. He didn't appear to be, and he showed up in a timely way, and I watched him use his card. He was elderly. He was an elderly man that he alluded to being somewhat in the military, but it never really made sense. Probably had mental illness. However, I didn't, I just wanted to make sure he was safe and let 'em know that you can't be homeless in Donnelly. We do have many children that are considered homeless, but they're considered homeless when they live with their grandparents.

Dave: Well, as a kid who lived with his grandparents in sixth grade, as well as my first year, I guess I was homeless sometimes too. Our parents were 19 or 20 when they had me. And I'm going to say Ill-equipped to raise children

Melissa: Without a doubt. Just they didn't have the means. They didn't have the money. They didn't know what they were doing. They were still in college at the time, so

Dave: Right in the mid sixties.

Melissa: Right. I, but I think that I often think Donnelly is a little version of every other city in the world. So when we had one homeless person, I talked to three other people that day that I said, did you see the homeless guy? And they said, yeah, I talked to him. They all, everybody, I know the part of it. They're like,

Dave: What's going on? You can't be here. The winter will kill you.

Melissa: And so if Las Vegas could go step back to, I mean we've always had transient kind of coming through and moving out, but homelessness, the hobo with the stick in the thing because of the railroad. I mean, there's always been that. But when it changed over to extraordinary drug addicts that whether that came and then mental illness or extreme mental illness from whatever causes the VA in our culture, something changed. And if we could go back to that time, I would say that you as a community member, whoever is watching this video, whoever I speak to, they're part of your community. So if you have someone that is in need or hurting in your community, help them and how can you help them? I asked him, do you need something? And yeah, she was trying to get the 300 bucks. I'm like, I don't have any money. I'm going to work. I'm not giving him any money to do that. And when I asked where he lived and he told me he has a home, I'm like, okay, so he has a family. He has a place to sleep. You are the one who taught me. Don't give them money because then they're just repeating that behavior and the behavior is going out and begging for money. It's Pavlovian. It's just

So, yeah. I mean, I'm not saying that everybody should unite and attack the streets and everybody tap on a person's shoulder and go, look, I can wash your hair. I can get you a new outfit and can I teach you how to clean up dog poop in my yard? I mean, I'm saying some can only do very, very low level repetition type activities from the homeless. I saw when I worked the last two summers in Las Vegas and I would bring out a water bottle and a red Bull, and then I'd go out later to check them and the water was left. So I am like, that didn't help.

Dave: I love your message. Your message is that as part of community, it's not accepting homelessness and immediately recognize it when it happens human and going out and approaching and this human, Hey, you cannot be here. What do we need to do as a community to help you? And if it's $300, I want to check that. Exactly. Let's take a little run and find out what's going on. Especially because unfortunately with substance use disorders is that they'll almost never tell you that I need to get fentanyl. No matter how many questions you ask them, they're going to work very hard to prove to you that that's not the issue. That's why I love having an immediate access clinic where people could come in and we could test them and then treat them.

Melissa: Right. That's key.

Dave: I'm really at an interesting spot here because we're kind of planning for next year, and in my first few years of running this clinic, I could just say we're trying, but now I have over a hundred staff. We're treating 60 to 80 new a week at this point. I can't look at the community and have a higher number of homeless at the end of this year and not say, what are you doing? So this systemic issue is now our responsibility now of substantial size to be able to effectuate this change. Not just look at how many clients did I get and did I treat them, but how is it helping the homeless situation at large? So we're at the brass tax phase of making stronger right now.

Melissa: The community cannot turn and just avoid that area. You cannot do that. Right. That's like sweeping it under the rug. It's still there,

Dave: Right? Agreed.

Melissa: Yeah. Don't sweep it under the rug. Take the rug away and let everybody know that you don't give them money. Don't make Vegas your home a safe haven to find fentanyl.

Dave: Agree.

Melissa: It's not where

Dave: It's awful. Bravo

Melissa: Awful.

Dave: I like that parable of the rural community perspective because that sense of community that's in each of us, whatever city, whether you're in New York City or you're in Donnelly, Idaho, that's beautiful.

Melissa: Yeah. I mean it's 10 times harder. I mean, even when you just go 20 minutes north to our sister school McCall, which has four, we have 150 in our school and they have 450 and they have have problems there that I don't have because I'm the only fourth grade teacher. So there are problems, and I'm not saying that why can't you fix it by just simply getting the entire community? We know that it's a multifaceted, multilayered, massive problem, and it is systemic. It's the system, and each individual is extremely unique.

Dave: Although part of what dad instilled in me is that even if the system's broke, that if we put our minds to it, we could fix our little part, kind of like the rigor and fervor that you attack education, the fact that kids are getting into your grade and then some don't have the optimal home lives. You don't say, well, oh, well, I can't do my job. To me, part of dad's thinking, which is in me here saying, listen, we have a homelessness crisis and I believe I have a skillset to be able to effectuate social change. So I think it's my responsibility to work as hard as I can to help solve this problem. Just the way you treat, I remember you calling me being like, Hey, the school district can't buy books for Dave. Can you help me get books? You're getting it done, whatever it takes. And that's a beautiful, like an American trait. Wow. You took a sabbatical on mindfulness?

Melissa: I did. I took a sabbatical. I took a one year off of work off of teaching and I called it my self-care year. So I You've just recovered from our Devon getting kidney transplant. I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, so I just got double whammied and it was perfectly timed. So I had put in enough years to take the sabbatical and I chose to study mindfulness at UMass, and I took two. It was actually an extensive course in teaching mindfulness to children in particular. Then I went on to, I'm not finished with it. You have to do a lot of other things, like a five day silent retreat, which I can't seem to wrap my head around, so I have to get that one covered and I'll do that. But yeah, so the mindfulness was excellent, and then Covid hit, so it happened to be it.

It was in the stars that my life would be set up to do that because I think without mindfulness, going through that pandemic and then what we're teaching the two years after the pandemic, so the last two years of teaching we're an unlike anything I had in the past, and I attribute it to what happened during we were ill-equipped to teach online and have kids prepare to only have the person that's teaching them be in this format. So I had kids plaster their face against, when can we do this reel? When will we be real again? And I'm like, oh, I'm sorry. So yeah, I mean, my kids are nine, they're nine years old, and they're like, what the heck? Learning to read with a mask and learning your alphabet, this is not possible. Yeah, it's not possible body language. The connection was they suffered tremendously. And this is the first year I feel like, okay, maybe this is the group that was in preschool,

Dave: So they're kind of, okay, so they're a little bit bubble. We're a little better now. These kids weren't as dramatically affected by Covid like

Melissa: Yeah, and it was global. I have contacts with people in Germany and people in China that teach, and they're like, no, no. It was absolutely global. There was no one that was not affected in their lives. It's not a generalization. Everyone on the planet was negatively affected by this pandemic, hence pandemic.

Dave: Wow.

Melissa: Yeah. And so we're recovering from that. What was the question?

Dave: No, I was talking about mindfulness.

Melissa: Oh yeah. So mindfulness. Yeah, mindfulness gave me the tools to be okay with that space and to actually study and study, breath work, study, emotional responses, it, meditation, listening. It's been an all around great enhancer in my life, in my work, and in my relationships with my husband, with you, with my mother, with everyone. Yeah. It has been. I am a much happier person, and I thought I was already a happy person.

Dave: You always were happy. You were always a joy to be around mean since me and you had chicken pox and we were in the loveseat looking outside and Hempstead not allowed to leave the

Melissa: House. Yeah. Have you seen the movie Inside Out?

Dave: I don't think so.

Melissa: It's a Pixar animated film. The Inside Out is Your emotions are, if the movie is about the, they gave personalities to each one of our major emotions, disgust and anger and joy and sadness. And so these all have characters. And I often would say, who's driving your console right now? Because they have the console and you've asked people, they say, oh, Joy's driving your console, and who's driving Mike's console? Anger drives Mike's console. And that's not a bad thing. It's not a bad thing. That's driving your

Dave: Console. Come

Melissa: On. Right.

Dave: Who's driving mine?

Melissa: Definitely a combination of joy and anger. A little disgust. You got a battling console in there,

Dave: Right? Okay. No, I agree.

Melissa: The movie, if you see the movie, and if you're a parent, I recommend you see the movie and then talk about it with your children because you are the number one teacher. You set the child up to have the mindset that they are going to believe, and I'm going to try to change if it's fixed.

Dave: That's great. Who is driving your console?

Melissa: And if you want joy to drive your console, just take a breath, breathe out your mouth, and three times that. Lucky number three, Einstein said it, three's a lucky number. Or was it Pyt? Yeah, might have been Pythagoras.

Dave: The Pythagorean theorem, A square plus B squared equal.

Melissa: Yeah. But it was pyres that said that three is a magical number. So three breaths helps reset your console, let's say, or just your emotions so that you don't respond emotionally. You respond with a good thought, which is what I teach my class. I don't directly teach them about drugs. I teach them how to respond in a healthy way when your best buddy or your sister or your brother or walk up and say, smoke this. It's really fun. I don't teach that. I teach responding to negative things in a healthy way.

Dave: Well, this is the Human Up podcast. What does human up mean to you?

Melissa: Well, I think that, well, we're all humans, and human up is to be the best version of yourself so that you can help lift others up. Because not everybody, some people are really, really suffering. And if you're able to stand and you have the capacity to help another person in your world, then you do it. It's not

Dave: Amen.

Melissa: Yeah.

Dave: It's funny, I was in my forties when I unlearned enough of what dad put in my head about the secret to life, which up until my forties, it was whoever gets more was my operant for living. Trying to appeal

Melissa: Production equals worth

Dave: And money fundamentally, and then shift to actually having a relationship with God and being of service to other humans. And to me, it took me years of practice before one, I developed a preponderance of evidence that being of service brings me joy. So I learned one. It is absolutely true, although it could be if you asked me what my little message in the world is, is that it's really in helping others. That joy, purpose, happiness, is all achieved.

Melissa: It's very humanistic, humanitarian,

Dave: Human up. Yeah. Thank you so much for being on my podcast. It

Melissa: Was a pleasure.

Dave: Anything you want to close with or should we wrap up?

Melissa: I like it. You're human up. Just step up, human up!

Dave: I love you so much.

Melissa: Leave the world better than you found it. Sorry, go ahead.

Dave: Yeah, no, amen. That's beautiful. Thank you for being a guest!