Bessemer processes

My father had an old aunt and uncle right outside of Pittsburgh. Once a year he would go visit them and watch tv. Barbe Beppo was confined to a wheelchair, and Aunt Tilly was confined to soap operas and Parliaments.
I would accompany my dad for about 4 years in a row, usually once a summer. I think 1984 was the first time I went out there. I was 4. By 1987, Barbe Beppo had died away, and Tilly was left by herself. At this point, she was on her last few puffs.
Two parts of these trips stand out in my mind as blurry but significant memories of my early youth. The first was that my dad would put on talk radio in the Nova on the drives across Pennsylvania, and I would fall asleep in the back seat. The conversations he would
have with the radio were urgent and understated. They were made up of a muttered phrase here and there, and threats. The theatricality of these dialogues, and the fact that neither party could hear the other, never bothered him. In fact, I think that's what he liked most--his
audience would never disagree, my dad writing their presence with his voice as a believable fiction.
The second thing was that, absent of my mom's watch, he would take me to McDonald's as many times as I wanted, as long as it was less than twice a day. There, I would get a Happy Meal with Chicken McNuggets. The product name's capitalization still doesn't escape me, as I
remember these bits of chicken as a recipe of novelty and vacancy of the European-ness that infused itself into my mom's cooking. McDonalds and parenting, to my dad, demanded a stern approach punctuated by occasional fits of lawlessness. The territory outside
of my mom's survey--the tacit and manly expanses of weekend travel, lawn care, and electronics--invited exogamous infidelities we would never report back home: fast food, dinner for breakfast, PG-13 movies, maybe an expensive Lego set to keep me occupied.
I don't remember much of Aunt Tilly. She was caught in the last stage of emphysema by the time I had developed enough of a consciousness to contemplate her mortality. Not to say that that was on the top of my activities list. But by the last trip out there, I had come to regard
her as the closest extension to my dad's side of the family. As his only relative here in the states, I decided that she meant something, something about my place in the world, and my dad's place, even if I couldn't figure out what that something was.
She never said much to me. She never said much to anyone, mostly because she couldn't. She was stuck to the couch, hooked to an oxygen tank except to smoke. But I liked her. There I would sit, television illuminating the near-lightless apartment, eating a slice of
store-bought pumpkin pie. Night time at 3pm. She would take a break from Phil Donahue to talk to my dad so I couldwatch cartoons in the after-school time slots.
Breathing apparatus hissing, my dad's soft voice trying to maintain a conversation with this dying woman, I force myself to eat the piecrust. Even the lawless need some discipline.