Lot 117
WILLIAM KURELEK, R.C.A.
Literature:
William Kurelek, Someone With Me, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 1973, pate 19.
Note:
“I had a fiendish attraction to cats,” Kurelek recalls in his 1973 autobiography, “my parents still have a picture of me as a baby, going after a kitten whose tail I intended to pull. A year or so later, I have a vague recollection of actually picking up our cat and throwing her on the hot stove. Her feet tripped in a peculiar kind of dance as they sizzled. Poor puzzy got off that stove mighty fast, I can tell you. I felt guilty right after that, but it was probably because I was afraid my parents would give me a licking if they found out”.
The small black feline found in A Cat’s First Winter is mercifully not the focus of hijinks courtesy of the Kurelek children, instead it walks gingerly through the thin blanket of snow surrounding the empty hay wagon. The cat is likely familiarizing itself with one of the first accumulations of snow of the season, the rectangle of lush green grass visible under the shelter of the wagon providing evidence of the transition between the seasons.