How Mister Mosely got his name is a bit of a weird story. It all started the day we went to Uncle Gavin’s to choose our puppy.
Dad said the puppies were a ‘real mixed bag’. He was right. When we looked in the kennel, some were spotty, some were nearly all black or brown, some were pretty big, some were little, some had short hair, some were furry. There was even one that had really long ears and it kept stepping on them and tripping over, which was pretty funny. Only a couple of the puppies looked like proper Dalmatians to me, but Uncle Gavin said even they weren’t really right.
When Uncle Gavin opened up the gate to the kennel all the puppies came running out at us. I remember they started jumping up on me and licking and scratching my legs and trying to chew my shoes. Mum says she had to pick me up to stop me from crying. I don’t remember that bit, but maybe it was true seeing how I was only a little kid then.
The puppies didn’t worry Dad at all. Uncle Gavin took a video that day. In the video Dad’s lying on the grass letting them climb all over him and lick his face and bite his ears. Mum and me are laughing at him. Dad’s laughing too, and you can hear him saying, ‘Help! Help! Save me! I’m being eaten alive by a pack of mad dogs!’ He used to do stupid stuff like that once.
It must have been after Uncle Gavin stopped filming that I saw Mister Mosely for the very first time. He hadn’t run out with the other puppies. He was back up at the kennel gate, sitting beside Madonna, just sort of watching and waiting. He looked all white and the sun made his coat go shiny.
I liked him right away. Maybe it was because he was just sitting there kind of waiting for me to see him. Mum reckons I pointed straight at him and said, ‘I want that one.’
Dad didn’t think much of my pick. He told me I should choose a puppy with a bit more ‘get up and go’. He said my puppy looked a bit ‘dopey’ and we should get a spotty puppy, one that was almost a true Dalmatian. He kept saying stuff like, ‘You don’t want that other one. He’s no good. He’s hardly got any spots. He’s not like a real Dalmatian. He’s mostly white.’
But I did want him, and that’s what I kept telling Dad.
‘I do! I want that one! The mostly one!’ That’s what Mum and Dad reckoned I kept saying over and over. ‘I want the mostly one! I want the mostly one!’
The next bit I don’t really remember exactly, but Mum says that Dad picked up my puppy and looked him right in the face and said, ‘Well, Mister Mostly, it looks like you’re it – looks like you’re the chosen one.’ Dad always joked that he gave in ‘just to shut me up’.
Anyway, I guess it was because I heard Dad say it that I started to call the new puppy Mister Mostly too. Only problem was, I couldn’t say it properly because I was just a little kid. I always left out the ‘t’ bit so it came out Mister Mosely. And because I called him Mister Mosely that’s what Mum and Dad started calling him too, except for sometimes when they called him Mister Moe or just plain Moe. Then Dad painted the name on the side of this big silver food bowl we bought and he spelled it M-O-S-E-L-Y because he said ‘mose’ rhymed with ‘hose’.
So that’s the story of how Mister Mosely got his name. Now I can’t imagine him ever being called anything else. So I think it’s pretty weird how it all happened just because he was ‘mostly’ white.