Mr Smith

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Mr. Smith Thought This Was the Ceramicists’ Men in Black

Dave Smith looked over the room with the solemn concentration of a man trying to remember whether he’d left the kiln on or merely the universe. Potters have that expression. They’re forever waiting for fire to render its opinion. Then he smiled the way only Dave could and said, “These are the ceramicists’ Men in Black.”

That was all it took.

Not government agents. Not UFO investigators. Ceramicists.

The room suddenly transformed into an underground fraternity whose secret weapon wasn’t a neuralyzer but a bucket of feldspar. Somewhere, someone was undoubtedly discussing cone temperatures with the gravity usually reserved for nuclear launch codes. Every teapot concealed classified information. Every glaze recipe was whispered like an alchemical password passed from one generation to the next. Reduction firing became less a technical process than a conspiracy requiring absolute silence.

I’d known Dave long enough to recognize that peculiar sparkle in his eye. He could take an ordinary observation and tilt it a few degrees until reality rolled off the table and landed somewhere much more interesting.

Ceramics was like that anyway. You spent days shaping mud, only to hand it over to a furnace that behaved like a philosopher with a drinking problem. The kiln accepted no appeals. It delivered revelation or heartbreak in equal measure. Potters pretended they controlled the outcome, but everyone knew the fire always had the final editorial rights.

Dave understood that.

Years later he’d trade clay for code, glaze notebooks for programming manuals, and eventually Wisconsin for Australia. The mediums kept changing, but the operating system remained unmistakably Dave Smith. Whether he was trimming a bowl, debugging software, tuning a guitar, or laughing at one of his own impossible metaphors, he carried the same quiet curiosity—as though existence itself were just another material waiting to be shaped.

Looking back, I suspect the ceramicists really were the Men in Black. They gathered around glowing kilns instead of flying saucers. They disappeared into studios instead of secret bunkers. They emerged carrying bowls instead of classified folders. Their fingerprints were permanently embedded in clay, smoke, ash, and impossible optimism.

The only extraterrestrials involved were the pots themselves, arriving from the kiln looking as though they’d spent the weekend visiting another planet before deciding to return, slightly transformed, with stories they refused to explain.

And Dave, of course, noticed it before anyone else. That’s what made him Dave Smith. He could find the extraordinary hiding inside the ordinary, then hand it to you as casually as a cup of coffee, leaving you to wonder whether the joke had just become a philosophy.