August in the town of Keene is busy. Tourists and summer people cheerfully overrun the hamlets, consistently in good humor because they are on vacation. People who work with the public here have always said that the August people are different from the July people, although they can’t quite put their finger on the difference. This is true at the Ausable Club as well as in local stores.

As I pull into my driveway, a beat-up compact car roars into the drive behind me, and a long lanky creature with orange curls unfolds itself from behind the steering wheel. It’s Oshkosh.

“B’gosh!” I shout. People have been greeting him this way forever. His real name is John, but his parents, Ted and Margo, nicknamed him Oshkosh after the Wisconsin City where they vacationed by the shores of Lake Winnebago one magic summer about 21 years ago. As far as I know he has never been called anything else.

His sister, Jenni, came along about three years later. Ted and Margo hadn’t been traveling much since Oshkosh arrived, so she wasn’t named after some exotic vacation spot. On the other hand, she wasn’t named anything as commonplace as Jennifer, either. No, she was christened Jennings, a name that sounds plural, as if they were expecting her to be twins, or even quints. She may have been named after William Jennings Bryan or Waylon Jennings, or Jennings could be a family name.

Later, the magic in Ted’s and Margo’s marriage dissipated, as if Lake Winnebago had never been. Still, they agree that the boy Jennings is dating is all wrong. The more they complain about him, the more she loves him.

I have changed so much. The stories I used to read about star-crossed young lovers kept apart by cruel parents I see now in a different light.

“Listen to your elders!” I hiss at the heroine. “It’s for your own good, you ninny!”

“I’m returning your Joan Baez CD,” Kosh now tells me. “You wouldn’t have any early Dylan I could borrow, would you?”

“Sure,” I tell him. I’m glad he likes the music I grew up with, and I’m not worried about getting back the CDs. My CD player broke years ago.

Kosh is questioning whether he’ll go back to college or take a year to travel. This was bound to happen. Naming him after a city on the shores of a distant northern lake has given him outlandish notions.

On the dining room table, a stack of newspapers awaits sorting. And can wait awhile longer, as far as I’m concerned. Oshkosh picks up a Boston paper, finds the want ads and starts going through them, running his finger down the page, his face crumpled with concentration.

“Antler work, antler work, can’t find any antler work.”

“Good luck.”

“Bob run,” he mutters. “Creosote buildup removal…”

I give him a sharp glance. Is he joking? Impossible to know for sure. I go to hunt for the Dylan CDs, and when I come back he is reading “Weekly World News: The World’s Only Reliable News.”

“Listen to this,” he says. “Alien cookbook found in wreckage of 1975 flying saucer crash. Hungarian goulash using real ground-up Hungarians. Canadian bacon …”

“Yeah. That article is really interesting. They say experts cracked the secret alien code with just one word: potato,” I tell him. “Here you go. Take that “Weekly World News” with you, why don’t you, I’m through with it.”

“Thanks. Cool! ‘Bride bursts into flames at altar.'”

Out he goes into the August heat, still reading, shoulders hunched. He folds himself into his car and reverses out of the drive as I watch. You can’t help but wonder with someone like Oshkosh where he’ll end up. Or, rather, where he’ll wander while he’s getting there.

Have a good week.

(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the Lake Placid News for over 20 years.)