Do you remember random things people said to you years ago?

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Do you remember things people said to you a long time ago? and not necessarily important things just random comments?

I remember this one time in middle school, I had a new pair of boots and the shoelaces were that slippery round kind that kept coming untied. Even a double knot wouldn't hold. So I had to keep retying them and this girl accused me of doing it on purpose to show them off. I have always remembered that I guess because I never understood why she said that and I had no idea what to say back to it. I thought it was more than obvious that they were coming untied on their own and it was a real nuisance to have to keep retying them.

Another time when I was older, we were having a dinner at church, and this girl asked me why I didn't suck up the strands of spaghetti in my mouth like everyone else did. I told her I don't do that because the sauce splashes and it makes a mess. And she and this other girl sitting beside her just looked at me like I had said the most bizarre thing ever.

I have others but those are the two that popped up in my mind today.

Oh my goodness yes! Your topic brought back some very special encounters. The most outstanding of these was from a teacher at school - not my teacher, I was never in his class and didn't know him - for some reason he came up to me when I was 12 and said: "Don't believe anyone who ever tells you that you won't make it. You are the one who is going to make it. Don't ever let anyone kill your confidence. I just wanted to tell you that; never forget it".

I never did forget it. Sometimes something as small as that can have the most enormous impact on your life.

I've had a teacher tell me, in sixth grade, that I won't make it past junior high.

Fortunately, at that time, I wasn't one who really listened to what people said.

I knew that I was going to graduate high school, and go to college (though I didn't go to college until 18 years after I graduated high school! LOL)

I've gotten better over the years; however, I could still be quite stubborn.

Yes, it can work either way - I was motivated to prove the teacher who believed in me was right; you were motivated to prove the teacher who didn't believe in you was wrong. Motivation is the common factor, in both cases...

My foster brother was like you - told he would never amount to anything time and time again by teachers, he started his own business at 17 and it's still going strong 60 years later, he's still running it!

You want to hear something funny?

I was never told, by my parents, that

1. I'll never amount to anything
2. I'm going to be a great man

I was never told anything, actually.

I just got punished for being bad. I was (rarely) praised for doing something good.

I was never helped with my homework. It was just taken for granted that I would get good grades. Even when I got thrown out of class (more than half the time in certain classes), I still managed to fail only ONE course throughout junior high and high school. That was English in 7th grade, first marking period.

It certainly was a different time.. there was never the hands-on parenting of today, no helicopter parents, no endless photographic record of our daily progress... it was "be seen and not heard, and preferably neither". It was largely assumed that we should behave ourselves as if we were small adults and be as little of a nuisance as possible. The adult world was what was considered important then, children were not really seen as particularly important in that era, more like the furniture - something you had. No wonder we couldn't wait to grow up...!

Yep...I had to shut up during Ed Sullivan.

Whenever we had "company," my brother and I were sent to our room, after we were introduced to the "company."

There was no TV in the room; we had to find something to occupy ourselves. Usually, I'd read, and my brother would play his stereo.

There was certainly nothing like "self-actualization" and things like that. We had to do what we were told...or else!

My mind is clogged with recollections like yours... In the second grade a teacher is escorting me through another teacher's classroom and she says, "Excuse us." A friend, Dr Dave, praises Bounty Towels (select-a-size).

My father used to tell me that I was going to end up being a taxi driver. He was on my case from the day he came back from WW2. 65 years later and he's in a nursing home, and we are going down to the dining room for dinner, he's in his motorized wheelchair and he looks me over (inspects me), and says, "Can't you do something with your hair?"

Yes. I think all sensory information we are exposed to is stored and retrievable in our subconscious, though we can't always retrieve it when we want to, or completely at will.

"Do something with your hair, it looks awful" is comment I got often. In those days girls didn't wear straight hair. We were expected to sleep with hair curlers every night but I wouldn't because they hurt too much.

"Wipe that muck off your face!" (any kind of makeup being defined as muck) though I don't think this was something random, it was systematic and unrelenting until I managed to escape~!

"Are you going out wearing that?"

Very much so. Even including random unimportant exchanges with random strangers I never saw again.
I've unintentionally made people uncomfortable remembering exactly what they said and mentioning it later.

Yes!
A lot of times when i'm having a conversation i say something like: "Hey, do you remember that time years ago when you said xxxxxx" and the person looks in silence to me for a while and then answer: Er... No.

I remember very little details like what you said, no matter how significant they proved to be to my life. I just have that kind of memory.. I remember everything.

But I can't remember what I did 2 minutes ago.

Yes I often remember snapshots of what people have said to me years ago, and a lot of it is fairly indifferent material. I don't think it's limited to what people have said, I remember a lot of trivial details for no apparent reason. I'm sure I forget a lot as well, but the detail of what I do remember surprises me, given the age of the memories.