My daughter and I were discussing things that we take for granted in our everyday lives, and our conversation led to "icons of the nineties" such as portable CD players, body-piercing jewelry, cellular phones and pagers, and other ubiquitous paraphernalia. I told her that there were icons from my childhood that were virtually "extinct", and completely unknown to hers. As an example, I mentioned the skatekey, at least one of which every person my age owned and took for granted as a given accoutrement of childhood.

To drive home my point, I proposed an experiment which we carried out last week at a summer barbeque that was populated by adults, teens, and children of a wide range of ages. We simply presented the object of our experiment (pictured below) to each guest, one at a time, and said "What's This?" The result was no surprise to me, and somewhat amazing to my daughter. Every person approximately 35 years or older immediately named the object correctly and exhibited a fuzzy warm glow of nostalgia. They all wanted to hold it, and thereby somehow have a brief transport back to a moment of heavy steel skates clamped to their shoes, gliding noisily down an asphalt-covered street somewhere in the town where they grew up. Everyone younger than that approximate cutoff had no idea what the object was, although a few guessed it was a "key of some kind".

After this brief social experiment left just about everyone at the barbeque that was over forty discussing their childhood and everyone younger moaning at having to hear it all, my daughter asked a very engaging question. What icon of the nineties will vanish into obscurity forty years from now with the same suddenness as the skatekey? I leave it to you to come up with the answer.

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