Remember when a nickel would buy us a candy bar or a bottle of pop? And even a penny amounted to something when inserted into a gumball machine. I recall that the Coke machine in the mechanics’ area at B.M. Werley Auto Company, the Ford dealership on Grand and University, got rid of possibly the last nickel pop machine in town, charging a dime for the “new and improved” product.

And the jerks that replaced the machine didn’t even provide a bottle larger than the six-ounce drink we received.

Some of those memories returned on Bonnie’s and my trip to Santa Fe last week. We had an appointment in Santa Fe, and decided to squeeze in a movie downtown at the Velvet Crown Theater. The maps app on our cell phone stopped speaking to us, so we needed to watch the car’s GPS very closely. As we approached the theater, we stopped at a series of parking meters.

They wouldn’t accept bills or plastic and certainly not those dollar presidential coins I usually carry, or the Sacajaweas. And that makes me wonder whether the newish dollars serve any purpose other than making people think you’re a cheapo when you plunk some of them down as a tip but they’re mistaken for a quarter. Try using the dollar coins for anything mechanical. They won’t fit, so what’s their appeal?

I digress. We had absolutely no coin that would satisfy Santa Fe’s yawning parking meters, so we went into a nearby business, where the clerk explained that we were taking her last quarter. As we left, she said, “You won’t get far with that.” And she was right.

The quarter gave us exactly seven minutes. Not much help. What to do? By the time we walked to the theater and asked for change (“Sorry! Company policy prevents us from giving change without a purchase”). We bought one of those 12-ounce cans of extremely sour lemonade for four dollars (that comes out to 33 cents an ounce) and received more quarters in change.

We identified with hamsters on treadmills: If we inserted a quarter into the parking meter and earned seven minutes’ credit, by the time we walked to another business for another quarter, the stingy meter would be squealing to be fed again. The multiple treks in search of a store willing to make change would, of course, benefit our cardiovascular systems, but the time consumed would spoil our cinema experience.

Finally, just to make sure we wouldn’t leave the matinee merely to find our car at the end of a tow chain, we somehow secured more quarters to cover the time we expected to be in the movie. If a quarter buys a motorist seven minutes, four of them get you 28 minutes. Our investment toward The Betterment of the Capital City was $4.50.

Minutes late, we wrestled with an unmanned ticket machine at the Violet Crown. It squirted out two tickets for 18 dollars, with senior discount. We’d expected to see a Meryl Streep flick but unbeknownst to us, we’d purchased tickets for “Our Little Sister,” a Japanese movie about daughters who’d been abandoned by their father, and who sired yet another daughter, and how they came to terms with life. The ticket dispenser even gave us the option of selecting reserved seats.

As we entered Auditorium 10, we heard a language we didn’t understand but assumed that soon the subtitles would disappear and the dialogue would revert to English. Well, that never happened. Instead, we sat for almost two hours of pure Japanese with English subtitles.

We counted five other people in the theater, all of them close to our age, all of whom must have dabbled in that Asian language. It wasn’t a bad experience: We laughed when the other five laughed, cried when they did, and left when they did.

“Our Little Sister” obviously was not our first choice. We searched for a comedy but found none to our liking. Later, we discovered we’d actually obtained tickets for a much later showing of the Meryl Streep film, Florence Foster Jenkins. But we needed to get home some time that day. We stayed in that auditorium for the duration of Three Sisters, facing quite a challenge.

My knowledge of the Japanese language is limited to about five words, one of which is “saki.” Now let’s return to the parking meter: We reached our car with a quarter’s worth of time remaining. There was no salivating meter person hoping to slap a ticket on to our windshield, nor was there a “boot” on our car, which would have cost us $50 to remove and another $50 for storage. And there were no quick-on-the-draw car-towing wreckers in the area.

In that day’s newspaper we read about how Santa Fe’s downtown merchants themselves had complained about the outrageous parking meter rates, and our understanding was that Mayor Javier Gonzales intended to address the issue that makes shoppers shun the downtown and splurge in the outskirts.

Many years ago, a nickel in a Las Vegas meter would give us an hour, and they didn’t automatically erase all the accrued time when cars left, a feature that let drivers “shop around” for meters with time remaining. We performed some mental calculations about the inflation that makes Santa Fe parking fees outrageous. I realize that a quarter can’t even come close to buying as much meter time as it used to.

When meters came to Las Vegas in the 1950s, a penny purchased 12 minutes, and a nickel would last an hour. A dime? That bought us an entire summer.

Driving away from the movie house, we noticed a few familiar sights, and when we returned to Las Vegas, we found out from our son, Diego, that a parking garage stands directly across the street from the Violet Crown.

Then it all started to make sense: The garage would have comped our parking if we’d simply produced a receipt from the movie house.