About

The piano is a used digital upright with weighted keys that fits in the corner of the bedroom where a dresser used to be. It has headphones for after nine o’clock and a lamp clipped to the music stand. I started at forty-six having never read a note, never had a lesson as a child, and never learned an instrument. I have an online course, a stack of graded books and a notebook where I log every session.

These pages are about what it is actually like to learn this late: how the practice habit was built, which pieces were the right ones at the right time, and the specific ways I got frustrated and then got past it. If you are starting in your forties or fifties and wondering whether it is pointless, it is not.