the lost years-a strange new place one of two

It is all a little fuzzy what happens next.
There is a summer shooting at bees with a bee-bee gun, and the karma that comes with it when everything changes and turns grey.  And then he realizes they happened in the opposite order.
He wakes us, there must have been a sense of shock.  One moment he was living in the sort of garden, a big house, his own room rides up a steep hill to school and then racing back down; kids his own age around, a sense of belonging in a place different from his old home, but nicer.  Not the lower middle class existence which his childhood eyes mistook for home, instead an upper crust life.  And then suddenly he was in a world he was completely unprepared for, emotionally and in training.
This house was on the edge of the increasingly urban decay.  In fact there was an abandoned house, once glorious with a spiraling staircase, now haunted and empty, the stairwell ready to collapse, the house soon to be wrecked and torn to the ground.  Only the adult would wonder at what had happened to cause this house to fall so far when the houses around it would withstand the test of time, if not decay. 
He rode this bike in the old neighborhood with those he called his friends, then to school up a steep hill and rushed it down.  He'd lost a friend there one year to politics but that would not encourage his mistrust of government.
Somehow and he never questions this, the bike was here.  When everything in this strange place left him alone, he had this bike to ride.  Years later he would realize even more than loneliness that desperation is something the equalizes people.  He was poorly equipped to handle the isolation.   It was his personality.  It was his age.  It was the loss of his mother.  It was the collapse of his family.  It was the move.  It was the bizarre living conditions.
You will have to remember that this was a time when things were very different.  The Reverend King had not yet made his last speech, Rosa Parks was getting ready for a trans-formative bus ride, a ride that would transform her and the entire country.
But what would be clear to an adult, but not the child, was that this family was now a rudderless ship and this house was the shore on which it washed before being cast into even further depths.