A Healing Love

The South Gate City Youth Band marks waning summer and its golden anniversary with a spirited selection of Main Street marches before easing into a medley of Sinatra classics. Ariel Legasppy’s silver trumpet catches splinters of light as he raises it to his lips and stands to face the audience.

“I did it my way,” the song goes, and Ariel, 16, closes his eyes, the voice of his horn cool, full and smooth--like Sinatra himself. Music fills Ariel. It is the language of his heart, revealing that part of him less visible than the scars of four surgeries.

He was born with eyes too far apart, ears folded forward, one lower than the other. As an infant, sutures on his skull cap fused prematurely, requiring surgery to allow his brain to grow normally. His forehead remains flat, and while further surgery could round it out, he isn’t sure it would be worth it.

The most prominent scar runs from ear to ear over the top of his head, but the more painful scars are within, close to his heart and his music. Throughout his life, he has been called names, stared at, tormented in the cruelest ways. He wonders whether people would say and do such things if they understood the devastation they caused.

Sometimes the most painful words are those expressed in whispers, and

in such hushed tones Ariel has heard others speculate that his physical peculiarities were punishment from God. Could they be right? he wondered as a child. Could even God be against him?

“I’ve always asked myself why a person like me would be born like this,” Ariel says. “I’m not that religious or anything, but I think there’s always challenges in life, and this is my challenge. If I meet this challenge, everything else in life is going to be easier for me. This will be my biggest challenge.”

That he now looks in the mirror and sees someone whole and good is a tribute, he says, to family, for it is family that has given him courage and hope, strong arms to wrap himself in, a soft lap for comfort.

A family need not be big to be strong, and as Ariel stands on stage performing his Sinatra solo, he plays for the one person who has always been there for him. Maria Legasppy, Ariel’s aunt, stands completely still next to the punch bowl, her hands clasped together beneath her chin.

When Ariel was a baby, he, his mother and Maria shared a house. It was Maria who switched to the graveyard shift, so she could be with him during the days. As he grew older, she took him to doctors’ appointments, met with teachers to demand measures be taken when students teased him; and when no one else was there to tell him he was beautiful, Maria was. The two of them became a family even before Maria gained custody.

“There were times when I wished I was never born,” Ariel says. “But she would always tell me to be strong, that I’m here for a reason, to prove that a person like me can make something of myself. So I’ve tried to be strong, because she was always strong.”

Maria cheers as Ariel ends his solo and bows to the audience. An august pride washes over him, a fullness that comes at the end of a long stretch in a steep, uphill climb.

A Purpose in Life

Ariel changed Maria in so many ways. With his peculiar smile and his desperate need and eventually with his courage, he brought purpose and meaning to her life.

“He is the biggest gift I have ever received,” she says. “He’s the only thing that I have.”

When Ariel’s mother remarried and left, Ariel, then 11, opted to stay with Maria, who eventually gained custody and raised him as her own. His father, Maria’s brother, lives in Las Vegas, and while Ariel says he feels close to him, they rarely see each other.

Maria describes Ariel’s childhood through a series of photographs taken before and after surgeries to document his transformation. In all of them, she sees only beauty.

It hadn’t even occurred to Ariel that he looked different until it was pointed out to him in the most piercing way. When he started preschool, he didn’t understand why children were laughing at him and saying that he looked like a frog.

He asked Maria, and in her heart she seethed and cried.

“Don’t listen to them,” she said. She contacted school officials demanding that measures be taken to eliminate such taunting. Just to make sure, she sometimes would drive around and around the school, waiting for recess, then lunch, so she could wave to Ariel when he entered the playground and assure herself he was OK.

“The kindergarten teacher made me stop,” she says, “She said Ariel was not playing with the other children because he was only paying attention to me.”

When Ariel was 10, Maria took him to Disneyland. They were standing in line for the Matterhorn when they heard the couple behind them whispering: “Look how ugly he is.” “He looks like ET.” “He must be an alien.” Ariel and Maria pretended not to hear.

Then the woman behind them left the line and returned with a group of friends so that they, too, could look and laugh at Ariel. It was at that point, Maria says, that they crossed a line. She whirled and confronted them: “This is my son. He deserves to be respected.”

Then Maria, 5-foot-2, a quality assurance supervisor for Nissin Foods, punched the man in the face. It felt good to vent such anger, she says, but then she looked at Ariel, and he was crying.

“The way that I was trying to help him was not the right way,” she says. “I told him I was sorry.”

There came a turning point in junior high school. For the first time, Ariel says, he stood his ground against the tormentors.

“I decided that it had to stop. I said, ‘What else you got for me. Call me another name, come on. That doesn’t hurt me. You’re ugly too. What makes you different from me? We’re the same, flesh and blood. If you want to call me more names, bring it on. I’m not going nowhere. I’ve been through hell, and I ain’t gonna go through hell no more.’ ”

Flesh and blood. Up until that point, there were many times when he felt there was nothing more to him than that. It would have been easy to give up, to fill himself with rage rather than perseverance, but Maria would not let him.

“She has always been my best friend,” he says. “I don’t know what would have happened to me if she hadn’t been there.”

Sometimes families emerge from unexpected places. They evolve from necessity rather than birth. They form new boundaries, and they love deeply, even if, sometimes, they do it wrong.

Gauging Emotions

In their Huntington Park home, Maria listens carefully to the music flowing from Ariel’s upstairs bedroom. She knows that when he is happy, the music is fast and loud, and he sometimes clenches his jaw, bears down hard and stretches for high D.

But in sadness, his footsteps become heavy, the music softens. His soul aches and cries in the playing of “Beautiful Maria of My Soul” over and over again. It’s a song, he says, that reaches the depths of great pain.

Maria feels it too as she listens. He is a young man now, and there seems less she can do for him. She has always pushed him hard to do well, maybe too hard at times, she says, but that too was out of love.

A high school senior, Ariel has a 3.5 grade-point average. He plays first chair trumpet and was chosen to be drum major of the Huntington Park High School marching band this year. His dream is to study music at USC.

“Music allows me to express myself to the world,” he says. “People might see me on the street and say, ‘He looks weird’ or some thing, but if they hear me play, they can see what’s inside my heart.”

He says he has learned to use life’s obstacles as a source of motivation, to try even harder to succeed and to help others who face similar hurdles. He attends meetings of the Craniofacial Support Network of Southern California, founded in 1996. It is, says founder Chris Fradkin, a place where healing begins for many families.

“We’re not here to discuss the specifics of the latest laser technology or microsurgery,” Fradkin says. “We’re here to create a sense of family and bring together people who are connected through common challenges.”

Members share joys, insights, fear and pain. They have learned what many people have not, which is to see the child behind the face. It is a lesson that translates well to much of life, Fradkin says: to seek beauty in all things.

Through the network, Ariel spends time with younger children.

“Mostly,” he says, “I try to tell them it’s going to be all right. I tell them to look at me. I went through it, and I made it.”

Dr. Henry Kawamoto, Ariel’s plastic surgeon, treats young patients from around the world. Many of them feel as if they are prisoners of their own faces, he says. His job is to release them.

“I’m constantly surprised by how strong they are,” he says. “Some of them with severe disfigurements get unwelcome stares and teasing. Then they have to endure the surgeries, and through it all, they do surprisingly well. I think it says a lot about the parents.”

Still, there are days when scars within seem to bleed anew and footsteps turn heavy. As Ariel paces slowly and plays “Beautiful Maria,” he sometimes wonders whether his real mother would have loved him more if he looked “normal.” He wonders whether jobs will be harder for him to find because of his appearance. And he wonders whether any of the girls at his high school will ever see beyond the physical and into his soul.

Where music and pain and beauty dwell.