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Another year has recently slipped into the books, and for me, it brought a reckoning.

Should I bow to the realities of the 21st Century? Or should I plow ahead with a project that had been born and nurtured in the 20th?

Should I be a stubborn old guy and refuse to recognize which way the winds are blowing? Or should I fold my tent?

For more than 25 years, I have regularly, methodically picked up loose change on the street.

There’s an amazing amount of it. All denominations. In all sorts of places. Even the occasional bill, if you’re lucky.

Each year, I would keep careful track of the haul. Then, on each December 31, my wife and I would decide who should reap the benefits. I’d send a check, and the next morning, the process would start all over again.

But this past December 31, I had netted only $45.47 during 2019. That’s less than half of what I used to collect in an average year.

The reason for the decline? A massive increase in parking meters where you can pay with a credit card.

In the old days, I could take a walk around any commercial area and go from meter to meter. There would often be a substantial haul right beside the stalk.

One memorable day, somebody (no doubt frustrated for some reason) left exactly 63 pennies on the ground, in a heap. I dutifully scooped them all up.

Another time, I discovered a mini-mountain of dimes, carefully stacked, resting between a meter and the curb. A buck fifty altogether.

Who knows why? They, too, went into the tally.

Pennies were the most common denomination, of course. But dimes were next, probably because they are thinnest, and make the least noise when they hit the ground.

I would even traffic in foreign coins. Some years, I would find a friendly soul at the local bank who would credit me with 63 cents, or whatever my bagful of francs and tuppence were worth that week.

It was a calling, I suppose you could say. And the charities to which we donated each year were both grateful and amused.

One development director wrote the following letter to me, which I have kept:

“I want to walk where you walk,” she said.

This past December 31, however, I doubt that she would have said that. It took a whole bunch of late December walks — and a whole bunch of stooping, peering and kicking hedges out of the way — to surpass 40 bucks.

Meanwhile, the future is obvious. We may not be all that close to a coin-free society — yet. But we are getting there.

So, I sent off my 2019 check (along with checks to other deserving organizations we routinely contribute to), and decided to abandon my collection efforts.

What will I miss, now that I no longer forage?

I will miss the time I was standing at the counter of my local pharmacy, waiting to pick up a prescription. My eye fell to the floor. Right beneath the Tootsie Rolls was a $100 bill! Obviously, that year was a very good one.

I will miss those bountiful moments at airports (always a happy hunting ground). Near the cash registers of any grab-and-go coffee place, my ship would almost always come in.

I will miss those evenings when my wife would come home from work and hand me four pennies. “Found these,” she’d say.

I hope I’m worth more than that to you, honey bunch, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.

I will even miss the guy who approached me three years ago on a crowded downtown street. I had five minutes to kill before a business appointment, so I was scrounging among the meters along 17th Street.

I was dressed very well. I had shaved and showered. I didn’t look malnourished. I didn’t look unhealthy. Without a word, the man came up to me and handed me a dollar.

He thought I was homeless!

Hey, I’ll take what I can get.

But reality is a raging, powerful river, so I decided to bow to cashless inevitability. As they like to say in the theater world when a show closes, “Nice run.”

On January 1, 2020, I took a walk along the commercial strip near where I live. I happened to glance down. There, in the middle of the sidewalk, was a shiny penny.

I picked it up. I put it in my pocket. When I got home, I wrote “$.01” on a pad.

Some old habits die hard. Some never do.