bygone days

If we flash back to the bygone days of the late 2000s, Merz’s future looked to be in the past: He was Angela Merkel's defeated right-wing rival in the Christian Democratic Union, the mainstream conservative party that has dominated German electoral politics since the fall of the Nazi regime, first in the former West Germany and then, less convincingly, in post-1990 reunified Germany.

I have made progress since those bygone days, but I still manage to get the batter down the sides — rarely a nice, clean entry for me.

And the street names — Strada Karl Marx, Strada Yuri Gagarin — hark back to bygone days of Soviet glory.

“I said all this not to wax poetic about bygone days, but because of the story of my family’s journey. Those who left and those who stayed is emblematic of the stories of so many Irish and American families, not just Irish American families.”

My father, who died two years ago at 95, was a typical Japanese salary man of the bygone days: hard-working, stoic and taciturn.