After 40 years of teaching art history and ceramics, primarily at Los Angeles City College, I am back in the studio making high-fired stoneware and porcelain. Functional and not-so-functional, for indoors and out. I was drawn to ceramics in high school, influenced by a gifted teacher, Tony Scaccia. My own teaching career has been in part an attempt at payback, and my early attachment to the ceramic medium has only grown through the years. I am struck by the complex cultural statements made by often simple pots in past cultures, as when a serving bowl became a ritual object ultimately entombed with its owner. Ceramic chemistry is also complex, yet it reflects basic natural processes that have shaped the earth. Basic, yet complex, both natural and cultural, pots carry historical breadth humbling to any potter. Following a master's degree in 1964 at UCLA under Laura Andreson and Bernie Kester, my first job in ceramics was at Architectural Pottery working under David Cressey. Each in their way were part of the mix of modernism with nostalgia for the tradition of the handcraft artisan that marked the post-WWII renaissance of studio ceramics. Mid-century modern Scandinavian ceramists were still active and a strong influence on my teachers (and their students). Likewise with the great Japanese ceramic tradition. Shoji Hamada had visited UCLA only a few years earlier. It was the era of the designer-craftsman, which David Cressey came to embody. As a young smart-ass, I rebelled against my teachers' seemingly dead tradition, and drawn in by the force that was Peter Voulkos, I made expressionist pots, Pop Art pots, anti-pots, and finally, not pots at all. Of course Andreson and Kester were actually devoted educators and skilled craftspersons, while Cressey remarkably merged handcraft tradition with large scale commercial production. I now feel their long reach; I'm making pots again, and the pots sure borrow a lot from theirs. Teaching and researching art history found me more than once in a museum room where a singly displayed pot more than held its own with sculpture and painting nearby. I had to ask, what would it mean for a simple pot to carry the weight and meaning of sculpture? Is it historical distance? Is it the powerful presence of primary forms, at once abstract, yet expressing meaning through reference to function? Still working on it. Long way to go, and now so little time.