The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 115

Sunday, June 5, 1994 1 Florida flash Louisiana gems Black history treasures found across state M5 mm to nii-iiiiiwin'i'lliiiiiniil Guide About the South Ann Landers Horoscopes Camera patrol helps identify lawbreakers M3 M2 M2 M7 M7 The Atlanta Journal The Atlanta Constitution kj fffaV WMJHB7 ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS I Depression and fulfillment are evident in the author's work. "I do seem to write a lot about women struggling through emotional trauma." Author, Atlanta Coming of Age No writer of 'spare little stories, she likes her adjectives and adverbs and enjoys giving them room to run Anne Rivera Siddons Signs "Downtown." p.m. Tuesday. Oxford Book Store, 360 Pharr Road N.E. 262-3333.

i i i i -A 'if a By Michael Skube BOOK CRITIC The title of her new book is taken from Petula Clark's upbeat hit from the '60s, but somehow you hear the wistfulness of Frank Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year." Anne Rivers Siddons is recalling a time when she was a young single in a little red Alfa Romeo zipping up Peachtree with the top down. She had been homecoming queen and a cheerleader in high school, she'd been "Loveliest of the Plains" at Auburn University, where she wrote for the campus newspaper, and now she was an editor at Atlanta magazine. The blue twilights of Atlanta, as she calls them in "Downtown," were only preludes to even brighter tomorrows, It was nearly 30 years ago, and no one could see that the dream would endJ The end came on April 4, 1968, when the Rev. Martin Luther King in whom impossible hopes rested, was assassinated. When King died, Siddons wrote years afterward, "the decade we had thought was our own would die, too." Two more decades came and went, and if Siddons is no longer the ingenue she once was, neither is she cynical about the lightness of what she had hoped for.

She is 58, a wealthy woman, author of 10 novels, happily married and yet something what? is missing. "It's the finished people who interest me," she says. She is sitting in the cedar bungalow behind her Brookhaven home where she writes. She is the picture of privilege, but there is also proof of accomplishment. On the shelves in the bungalow sit multiple copies of her books, several of them best sellers.

There must be three dozen copies of "Home-place." Anne Rivers Siddons, who grew up 20 miles away in the Please see SIDDONS, M4 -AS v- I 4 Daughter sets leisurely pace for shopping Never let it be said that I don't try to learn from my children and my children's children. It's not always easy. I am not always a diligent and dedicated student, and they are not always patient teachers. But if you persevere, they have lessons to teach. For instance, my now Omaha-dwelling daughter, in town because of the illness of her middle child, decided to reward herself with a shopping spree.

She wanted my company. Now, I'm not a natural, to-the-cash-register-born shopper. I believe in grabbing up such merchandise as you have to have at the last possible moment, paying for it and getting out of the parking lot. I don't comparison-shop, and I have never been known to return a purchase. If you were so ill-advised as to buy it, you're stuck with it, I say.

That shows that I have no talent for the finer facets of shopping. Returning and exchanging can be as rewarding as making the original purchase, say my shopping friends and relatives. As for comparative shopping, look at all the good stores you get to visit, all the good merchandise you get to look at, finger, try on! So I wasn't enthusiastic about going shopping with my daughter, but I felt compelled to make the effort because she lives so far away and because she has had illness in the family. Wouldn't you know she drove me not to J.M. High's on Whitehall Street, of ancient recollection, or any of its seedy successors, but to something new on the landscape The Pottery Plant on the outskirts of Commerce.

Now, I've known about the retail outlets there by the expressway and was tempted to poke about there once but was saved from serious shopping by the fact that we had three little children with us, and the luster of the enterprise was diminished by my granddaughter's losing the keys to the car. But The Pottery Plant is something I never saw before. It was acres and acres of the kind of stuff I like flowerpots and dishes and fertilizer and plants, hundreds of baskets and even windsocks and lemonade pitchers. I looked at its vastness in dismay. So much territory to cover in one afternoon? Ah, said my daughter, there's a technique.

First, you have to have on your most comfortable shoes and be fortified with a light meal. Do not go hungry into the fray. Then you divide the territory into easily digested segments. Take two to start. Stop for a cup of coffee and to rest your feet.

We started with garden statuary and clay pots, moving on to glassware and clocks. (I got a fine one for the beach house for $3.98.) You can dip into place mats and potholders if you want to, or lift the lids on beautiful big roasting pans which now come in colors. (I wanted a green one but resisted, mainly because a lady who was buying six torches for her back yard kept jabbing me in the ribs.) Two hours later we had done the Christmas shop and the baskets and were headed for the greenhouse and nursery department. Lunchtime, my daughter said, and time for foot ease. We got through it all with only one more coffee stop and went clanking home with all the wondrous stuff she vows she find in Omaha.

I did get a nice pot for a rosemary plant but guess what, it was made in Italy a long way from Commerce, Ga. i i Photo by DAVID TUUS Staff Atlanta today is "younger, hipper, glitzier" than in the '60s, says Anne Rivers Siddons, relaxing on the porch of the bungalow behind her Brookhaven home (above). She does her writing In the bungalow's study (right). Reflections of a Tobacco Farm Life JOHN AMOSS Sufi Photographer David Spear lives down the road from the Neugents in Madison, N.C. He spent six years chronicling the lives of the tobacco farming family whose hardscrabble existence is part of a vanishing rural America.

The result is a rough-edged documentary coffee-table book "The Neugents 'Close to Home' just out from the offbeat N.C publishers The Jargon Society. Self-sufficient and unapol-ogetic, the Neugents' faces confront the viewer with a steady and fascinating honesty. An Interview with the photographer, Page MS. i Alligator's image stretches the idea of small-town life Reflections of Louisiana life revisit the fact and fiction that form the legend of Hardhide, Ponchatoula's atypical alligator and ambassador of good will. See True South, Page M2..