After more than two decades, thousands of you have shared their experiences of lost New Mexico in the "One of Our 50 is Missing" humor column. Tell us your experiences at fifty@nmmagazine.com.
Doggone Confusion
Norma McDowell got out of the Navy in the late 1950s and moved to Los Alamos, where she worked for the Atomic Energy Commission. There she met and married a man from the state of South Dakota. Norma and her husband bought a home in La Mesilla, near Española, and anticipated that his parents would come visit. “I would ask when they were going to come to New Mexico to visit us. My mother-in-law finally confessed that the reason they hadn’t was because they couldn’t bear the thought of having their beloved little dog quarantined for 10 days before they could bring her back into the` United States, when they were ready to go home!”
A Legal Question
Ron Foote, originally of Mountainair and Vaughn, is currently pursuing his doctoral degree in Seattle, Washington. Not too long ago, in class, he mentioned that he was interested in wind energy in New Mexico. “A fellow doctoral candidate asked me, ‘Are you legal?’ I was thrown off a bit and told him that I didn’t understand the question. ‘Legal for what? Wind energy?’ He said, ‘No. Are you legally here in the U.S.?’” Foote mentioned that New Mexico is a state in the union and made up the big swath of land between Texas and Arizona. His classmate, clearly not a good listener, responded, “You should do whatever you can to get legal and stay here in this country. All that drug crime down there, it’s dangerous.”
When Dr. Deborah Fisher moved from Houston, Texas, to New Mexico in 1994, she called Allied Van Lines and asked for a quote to move to Albuquerque, New Mexico. “They said, ‘That would be international,’ then they put me on hold before I could tell them that Albuquerque is in the United States.”