What's So Great About Seventeen?

One of my favorite children’s books and a beautifully done Disney film is Tuck Everlasting. While doing my nanny job this week I got the privilege of watching it. Something about the movie got me thinking. What is so magical about the age of seventeen?

For instance:
 Jesse Tuck will forever be seventeen
 Edward Cullen became a vampire at seventeen
 There is a book called Seventeenth Summer
 Zac Efron goes back to seventeen in Seventeen Again
 MTV has a television show about celebrities when they were seventeen
 There is even a magazine publication called Seventeen

Those are just a few examples that came to my mind, but still I don’t really understand the greatest of seventeen. Maybe it has something to do with the last year of true youth?

I remember when I was seventeen I was just starting my junior year of high school. I had a supportive group of friends whom I got to eat lunch with everyday. It was the first year I was allowed to go to prom and the first year in a while that I took the initiative to ask someone. It was the first year I started my music list and the year I got to see Switchfoot at the State Fair.

I had a pretty decent seventeenth year don’t get me wrong, but I wouldn’t imagine my eternity being that age. Maybe I say this now that I’m twenty-one and five years after the fact, but seventeen has never been my favorite year of my life. When I was seventeen not only did I have so many wonderful things happen to me I also had some bad things that I would rather forget. I learned a lot in my seventeenth year of life. Many lessons I wouldn’t trade and many memories I will always remember.

Yet I’ve learned so much since l was seventeen. I realize now how much I wish I’d known more back then. I’m a wise twenty-one year old on the verge of twenty-two. So instead of looking in the past hoping to be seventeen permanently I look forward to the future. Maybe growing up will give me the ability to learn even more. Seventeen years from this moment I will be almost forty and although I wonder where my life will be I know that this is for god to decide. I might laugh to myself during those days and maybe I might then wish to be seventeen again. I don’t really know, but the possibilities are endless.