Follow the lead of the piano-playing chickens to teach an old dog new tricks

I was head-down in the middle of a hugely productive day of work this week when my tween came running into the home office with an excited, “Hey, Dad!”

I turned around with a big smile — a smile that immediately dropped.

“You got another letter from the AARP!”

Few things bring the boy as much glee as confirmation that his old man really is… well, an old man. And ever since I explained what that steady stream of junk mail from the AARP means, he never misses an opportunity to hand me the latest envelope from the organization with a laugh.

I tell him I’m way too young to be getting those letters, but then later I’ll accidentally undo all my arguments with some reminiscence from my youth that, to him at least, sounds like lines from a history book.

My latest memory ran so counter to everything the boy knows about the world — from how we treat animals to what passes for entertainment — that I’m pretty sure he thought I was pulling his leg.

“When I was a kid, there was a place at the town carnival where you could drop a quarter into a slot and a chicken would play the piano.”

When I turned to Google to prove that I wasn’t making it up, I fell down a rabbit hole of videos showing that the piano player was just one of a variety of performing chickens the carnival could have landed. Some of them played tic-tac-toe when a quarter slid down the slot, and others would dance.

Even a kid could see that the piano-playing chickens had no idea what they were doing. They just waited for the machinery behind their cage to drop seed onto the piano keys in the right order and then happened to plink out notes as they pecked up the food.

But you had to hand it to them, they got the job of playing the piano done despite not understanding a single thing about music.

Every once in a while, I can relate.

I wasn’t much better than those chickens back in my early 20s, when I looked around the kitchen of my first apartment knowing that I had almost no cooking experience. But if a bird could hammer out a tune by being given one simple step at a time, surely a young man could follow a recipe line by line and come out the other side with something edible.

The old carnival came to mind again last year when I took on a new project at work, something that regularly plunged me deep into a long file of computer code. Some of the code had stopped working right, and became my job to fix it even though it was just about as incomprehensible to me as sheet music would have been to those piano-playing chickens.

No problem. I just took careful notes in training and then followed the instructions line by line, changing bits of broken code I didn’t understand to bits of working code I didn’t understand.

And you know what? Something surprising happens every time I take that approach.

After I’ve blindly followed step-by-step instructions through a baffling job enough times, I look up one day and realize that I actually understand how to do it on my own. I can cook a good meal from scratch with no recipe now, and I’ve worked out enough of the computer code by now to fix what I need without leaning too much on the notes I took in training.

I may be the old dog that my kid sees me as, but that doesn’t stop me from picking up new tricks — not as long as I follow the lesson of the piano-playing chickens.

Richard Espinoza is a former editor of the Johnson County Neighborhood News. You can reach him at respinozakc@yahoo.com. And follow him on Twitter at @respinozakc.

This story was originally published August 3, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Follow the lead of the piano-playing chickens to teach an old dog new tricks."