The kid is about 12 years old and clearly in need of some kind of ADD medication. I’m sitting behind a glass partition, trying to play something coherent on a drum set, struggling to keep up with Dwight Yoakam’s crack band on a CD doing “Little Sister.” You know, “… little sister don’t you do what your big sister does … .”

The kid is bouncing up and down in front of one of the 5-foot-by-5-foot windows surrounding the practice area, looking in at me and my instructor, as if to say, “End it, old man … it’s my turn.” My instructor rolls his eyes and says, “The kid is good, real good, but he can’t take direction. He plays all the time, day and night.” I look out again while I’m playing, and see the kid pop up into view again, his straight, longish black hair flopping up and down as he bounces. I feel like making a face at him, or, even better, flashing the Rhode Island salute. It’s especially annoying because the kid would probably make me look silly and slow and old if he started playing some of his hot licks. I control myself.

It’s just another of the awkward moments you endure when you are trying to accomplish something you should have done decades ago, if at all. It’s like learning to ride a bike for the first time at age 45, say. But I put up with it because, I’m what some people would call determined, others would refer to as stupidly stubborn.

I decided to take up playing the drums, country and rock ’n’ roll and swing in my later years … I mean, from scratch.

It seemed to make sense to try: I love the music, my kids are grown and gone, and my mother, long gone now, too, tried to get me interested in the drums many, many summers ago, probably because I was just as big a pain in the neck as the kid at my lesson is and it might keep me out of her hair. But I was too busy with other things then, and too busy with still other things after that. So, I said to myself when I started, “Hey Ma, this is for you.”

So I persevered, practicing every day, first with the exercises my instructor provided . . . “left, right, left, left, right, right, left, left, left, right, right, right. . . . OK, double time” and eventually trying to play along with the music from terrific, professional drummers on CDs. When you get into it at that level, you are amazed at how accomplished and together even mediocre professional musicians are.

At first, I told my instructor that I wasn’t sure where I was going with it … that I just wanted to try it and see what happened. And he said, “Stay with it as long as you’re enjoying yourself. … Don’t think beyond that. At some point, it may all open up for you. ”

I have to say I struggled at first, not that I was so bad, but I seemed to be so far behind the good drummers. Some days it sounded OK to me, and others, so bad I wondered why I was doing it at all. It was noise, not music. I just couldn’t keep up, it seemed. But by this time, I’d invested several hundred dollars in a drum set and thought, “Well, I’d better at least try to get my money’s worth out of this.”

And then, a little over a year into the lessons, I started to “feel it,” as musicians say. I didn’t have to “learn” and write down what I was supposed to do with each song I tried to play. I started to just pick up the beat after a couple of measures. Even the fills — the parts a drummer adds when there’s a pause in the singing — started to come naturally.

Suddenly, it’s not a chore down in the basement; it’s a pleasure. I still don’t know what, if anything, is going to come of it. But I really don’t care now. I just enjoy playing.

I guess the moral is that a sense of satisfaction is worth way more than its weight in gold. And also, it might take a while, but mothers are never wrong.

Gene Schumacher is a section editor in the Features Department.