What was going on when I was born?

In "The Great Gatsby," Nick Carraway is asked what he does for a living. He replies simply, "I'm a bond man."

Rates on Treasury bills soared to record heights yesterday, exceeding 15 percent for the first time in the Government's weekly sales of these shortterm securities. Until last October, bills had never been sold at rates as high as 10 percent, and they reached 13 percent only two weeks ago.

Outside St. Brigid's School, on a mostly burned-out, abandoned block of Avenue B on Manhattan's Lower East Side, one bare, scrawny tree stood in a snow flurry. Inside a first-floor classroom, Sister Linda Anne Mitchell announced to her fourth-grade class: "That tree looks kind of dead out there now. But it's going to come alive-- the whole world's going to come alive at Easter."

BOGOTA, Colombia, March 3--On a makeshift flagpole on the roof of the Dominican Embassy here, the black, red and blue flag of the M-19 guerrilla movement hangs limply in the thin Andes air. In the three-story embassy and residence below, hooded terrorists, captive diplomats from 17 countries and a group of other prisoners have spent five days in close quarters.

BOSTON, March 3--A record number of Massachusetts voters, 1.5 million, are expected to cast ballots tomorrow in the first large-state Presidential primary of 1980, in which Representative John B. Anderson of Illinois, who polled less than 10 percent of the Republican vote in New Hampshire last week, now emerges as a strong contender.

Rupert Murdoch agreed yesterday to buy Cue-New York magazine for $5 million and announced plans to merge the biweekly entertainment, arts and dining guide into his rival New York magazine, a step that could make New York both more prosperous and more appealing editorially.

In numbing cold, thousands of transit and city police officers paid tribute yesterday to a transit policeman, Irving W. Smith, who was killed while off duty Friday stopping a bar holdup in Brooklyn.

WASHINGTON, March 3--The Administration's new anti-inflation effort emerged today, in the view of senior economic officials, as likely to call for spending reductions of about $4 billion in the current fiscal year and about $15 billion next year in an attempt to balance the fiscal year 1981 budget.

IN a few weeks, eastern Long Island's potato farmers will begin planting their crop. But this year they will do so without a pesticide known as Temik. It was withdrawn from use last month, leaving behind worried residents, whose water wells have been contaminated, and perplexed farmers who now must cope with the destructive Colorado potato beetle and the golden nematode without their chemical weapon of choice.

Eastern Air Lines plans to announce today an all-out entry into the alreadycrowded New York-California market, stressing fare and service innovations aimed at drawing customers from its "Big Three" competitors.