Bikes.

When I was little, I desperately wanted a diary. Not just any diary, though--a password diary. It wasn't that I had anything particularly interesting to say, it was just the idea of having secret information that nobody else could know. For this reason, an ordinary diary wouldn't do. Sure, I could easily find a fantastic place to conceal it, but even with the smallest chances that someone could find it, the fact was that someone could find it! I needed to make sure that even IF it could be found, it couldn't be read. Hence, the password aspect that made this diary so mysteriously wonderful.

After a month of agony, Christmas rolled around and I received this as a gift from Santa for being the good little girl I had been all year. Later that day, my mother took me into her closet and sat me down on the floor to invent the perfect password; for all the time that I had wished for the password diary, I had not once even thought of the fact that I would need a password to open it. She explained that a password is a word or phrase that is especially important to you, and of all the ways she tried to get the idea across to me, my mind grasped the words "something you like to do." After a short hesitation, I took the diary from her lap and recorded my voice saying into it a single word: bikes.

Despite the fact that my grammar is a little off, please remember that I was young and was not aware of the fact that one cannot do a bike, I do believe this was an originally wonderful answer, young Verdi. Of all the things I could have said (that would have been reasonable for my age)--Pokemon, watching TV, lip syncing to Christina Aguilera, etc. I managed to choose something that did not relate to pop culture in anyway, which is more than what I can say for this generation. Who of today's kids would enjoy a simple bike ride with their families over the virtual world of a video game where they can half a zombie with the press of a finger? No, I chose an object which to me, symbolized something inexplicably more important to me than all things else in time.

Back when families were functional, that is.