Give me an iPod and I can run for miles. Take it away and I’m bored after a mile or two and looking for better things to do like watching paint dry. Music can touch a range of feelings, bring inspiration, take us back to a time and place, and capture our undivided attention.

It can be a powerful tool, and it seems many on the spectrum closely associate with it.

When Mason’s world is in chaos, everything can be made right by simply playing his favorite tunes. He gravitates towards classical music, specifically anything in the Baby Einstein or Little Einstein series. Even when listening to classical radio, he’ll name each instrument that he recognizes and even gets some that I don’t know.

On occasion, he’ll even listen to his sibling’s music, Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, and mom & dad’s flashbacks to old school rap and 80’s new wave sounds.

Like us, he has a wide range of musical tastes.

Since Hurricane Ike sent all his leftover rain to the DFW metroplex yesterday, we spent most of our time indoors playing games, doing crafts, playing the Wii, and today, fooling around on the piano.

We have a piano that we bought a few months ago with the hope that we’d find a slice of time and a leftover bag of money to fund some piano lessons for Mason, of which we found neither. He seemed, on many occasions, to have an ear for catching tunes and we’d often hear him keying songs on the cheap battery operated keyboard we picked up somewhere during the years.

Today, while Rashele was at the movies with our two older kids, Mason and I had the chance to have the house to ourselves and made as much noise as we wanted to on the piano with no interruptions.

He keyed each natural note in succinct repetition, counting each key from low note to high.

52 keys.

Then he started on the sharp/flats from high to low. Counting like he did previously, but picking up from 52 and so forth, counting all the way up to 88.

88 keys he noted to himself in a quiet whisper.

We combined all of our musical knowledge into 30 minutes of piano time. I play a mean set of chopsticks, and Mason figured out Mary Had a Little Lamb on his own months ago.

It was great seeing him completely engaged in our time together telling me when to key certain notes, and when to stop and let him do it. On many occasions he’s asked us to open up the piano so he can see the interior strings engaged when struck by their key. He loves to see how things work.

I know soon, while he will probably never been a concert pianist, he will find a way to make his own special music.