“Odessa,” she said, referred not just to her lineage but also to a transformative trip she took there in 2008 with her father. In a sense, it was a place that had always separated them — it embodied a language, a regime and a past that she could never share. Her father fled Ukraine in 1980 when he was 28, and he vowed never to return. Even in America, old habits, like his KGB-induced skepticism of the police lingered. Malis said that during her childhood in Trumbull, Conn., near New Haven, he would close the living-room blinds whenever he wanted to discuss anything “sensitive,” like summer travel plans or family finances. The city loomed large in her father’s consciousness when Malis was growing up. She once asked why there was no fleck of green anywhere in their house — not in the wallpaper, pictures, dishes, throw rugs — and her mother explained that it was because the color reminded him of painful early years spent in the army.

On that trip back, Malis paid for her father’s plane ticket and arranged their accommodations, and they were both surprised to find him just as lost as she was in the streets of Odessa. Her laconic father was more talkative, though, in his native tongue. He was strangely calm visiting his father’s grave but became choked up when he showed her the tracks where he caught the train that whisked him out of the city one panicked night so long ago. Above all, Malis said, typing “Odessa” every time she logged in to her computer was a reminder of the true epiphany she carried home: that getting closer to something — her father, this city — didn’t make it smaller or more manageable. “It actually just brought their complexity and nuance more into focus,” she said.

At least as interesting as the amount of thought Malis had packed into this one six-letter word was the fact that she was telling me it all. I confessed to her that I loved “Odessa” as a password. At the same time, I worried that her office’s techies might not share my affection, given that their first rule is to avoid choosing passwords with personal significance. Malis pointed out that we break that rule precisely because secure passwords are so much harder to remember. Our brains are prone to mooring new memories to old ones, she said. I added that I thought the behavior spoke to something deeper, something almost Cartesian. Humans like, even need, to imbue things with meaning, I suggested. We’re prone to organizing symbols into language.

Malis gave me an inquisitive look. So I continued: We try to make the best of our circumstances, converting our shackles into art, I said. Amid all that is ephemeral, we strive for permanence, in this case ignoring instructions to make passwords disposable, opting instead to preserve our special ones. These very tendencies are what distinguish us as a species.

These special passwords are a bit like origami, I suggested: small and often impromptu acts of creativity, sometimes found in the most banal of places. Malis seemed to agree. She nodded, shook my hand and left.

Asking strangers about their passwords is a touchy proposition. Push too hard, and you come off as a prospective hacker. Go too easy, and people just rant about how much they hate passwords. Still, it’s not every day that you stumble across a conversation topic that teaches you new things about people you’ve known for years.

I discovered, for example, that my father — a recently retired federal judge and generally a pretty serious guy — derived his passwords from a closeted love for goofy, novelty songs from the late ’50s and early ’60s (“The Purple People Eater,” “Monster Mash”).