What was going on when I was born?

WASHINGTON FOUR times she proposed, only to be left at the altar. But now, after her fifth proposal in as many years, the new man in the White House has accepted, pledging: ''I will.'' All this has to do with Representative Millicent Fenwick's perenially popular proposal to scuttle the so-called ''tax on marriage,'' the tax provisions that discriminate against millions of married couples when both husband and wife have earned incomes. A prime example offered by Mrs. Fenwick is that of the husband with a modest income of $10,000 whose wife, to help make ends meet, gets a similar $10,000 job. Their income doubles, but their income-tax bill quadruples.

EXCEPT for the chilly weather, it seemed like a Fourth of July parade. The Weber High School band, decked out in red, white and black, struck up the tune ''God Bless America'' as the color guard of the First National Bank of Chicago stood rigidly at attention. But the crowd that gathered last week in a parking lot on a commercial strip on this city's northwest side had come for a new kind of patriotic celebration - a salute to free enterprise. Polk Brothers, a furniture chain based here, had invited the crowd to witness the unveiling of a billboard reading ''Let's Rebuild, America in the 80's.'' That message will appear on 200 similar billboards that Polk will set up across the country as part of a drive by the Chamber of Commerce of the United States to garner grass-roots support for President Reagan's economic plan.

Governor Carey today offered a package of 22 bills to reduce state regulation of business, including a proposal to aid the development of electronic branch banking in the state. The bills also seek to eliminate duplicative regulations, reduce the number of environmental permits required of businesses and deregulate parts of the state's trucking and bus industries. They were designed, Mr. Carey said, ''to stimulate economic development and foster renewed entrepreneurial spirit.'' Richard J. Roth, spokesman for the Senate Republican majority leader, Warren M. Anderson of Binghamton, said he could not assess the proposals' chances of passage until he had studied them. But he added, ''The concept of deregulation is certainly one that Senate Republicans can accept and that we've been trying to do in various ways.''

PORT WASHINGTON POTENTIALLY dangerous concentrations of methane gas have been found in homes near the North Hempstead Town landfill here, and while the discovery has left homeowners worrying that methane explosions could set their homes on fire whenever it rains, town officials have proposed a long-term solution that would allow the landfill to be phased out. That proposal - a $50 million garbage-recycling plant constructed by the Power Authority of New York - would not solve the immediate problem of the methane. But town officials are counting on 40 special vents that they began drilling at the edge of the landfill last week to reduce levels of the odorless gas found in homes nearby. As local fire marshals and county health inspectors continued their daily checks for methane, officials began a detailed review of the recycling-plant proposal. The basic plan raised questions about the reliability of the technology involved and the timing of the announcement, which caught assemblymen and area officials by surprise.

KILLINGLY FROM the magnificent New England country estates of Pomfret to Killingly's century-old brick Town Hall, evidence abounds of the wealth and style that the textile industry brought to northeastern Connecticut in the 1800's. But for most of this century, since the textile companies moved south and a 1955 flood destroyed much of the remaining industry, the 10 towns from Canterbury to Thompson have been an economic backwater. While there are signs that the economic pace is now quickening, the area remains vulnerable. ''We've been faced with high unemployment, low income, and a low education level in the area'' since the textile industry collapsed before World War II, said Thomas Dwyer, Town Manager of Killingly. The economic statistics are grim for the Danielson area, which comprises the towns of Thompson, Putnam, Killingly, Sterling, Plainfield, Canterbury, Brooklyn, Pomfret, Eastford and Woodstock. Manufacturing employment accounts for 48 percent of the jobs, as against 30 percent for the state as a whole, and is concentrated in low-wage rubber, plastics, and textile factories.

Francisco Franco was still in his grave last week and Spain's fledgling democracy almost joined him. Seeking a return to military rule, 200 rightist soldiers seized Parliament and held most of the country's leaders at gunpoint for 18 hours before surrendering on orders from Spain's supreme authority, King Juan Carlos. More than a million people marched in Madrid Friday, celebrating the survival of democracy and the cool courage shown by the hostage parliamentarians and their king. In an extraordinary demonstration of democratic solidarity, rightist Manuel Fraga Iribarne and Communist leader Santiago Carrillo marched arm-in-arm.

A group of House Democrats is maneuvering to dissuade the Reagan Administration from military involvement in El Salvador's guerrilla conflict, but its members concede they lack the strength to block President Reagan if he wants to send arms and military advisers to the Central American nation. In the Senate the Democratic opposition is scattered, bowing to a fairly solid Republican majority, to the conservative mood of the moment and to the momentum of Mr. Reagan's political honeymoon. It is in marked contrast with the situation of December 1975, when a Democratic majority blocked President Ford's effort to aid Angolan anti-Communists. The momentum in President Reagan's policy was illustrated today by a State Department announcement that a Navy training team had been assigned to El Salvador to help maintain patrol craft equipment. (Page 14.)

The new wave of office construction in Manhattan is bringing with it a transition in fundamental relationships between builders and lenders, between owners and tenants, and between developers and the city government. Above all the changes are a response to the fear of continuing inflation. Self-protection is the goal of all as the various parties to the development process take long-term risks in what has been an inflationary environment. At the same time, a new generation of builders is emerging. Some are the next generation in building families that go back many years in Manhattan. Others are sustantial builders from abroad or out of town making their entry to the nation's largest office-construction market. Still others are individual entrepreneurs with a New York background making first ventures in Manhattan office construction.

THE Transamerica Corporation has an image problem. Mr. Average American, it seems, is hard-pressed to know what it is that Transamerica does. In the investment community, as one Wall Street analyst put it, ''There are only a handful of people who can even spell Transamerica.'' Ask someone what Transamerica is - all $4.4 billion of it - and you draw long hard stares. So one of the conglomerate's chief ambitions is to mold Transamerica into an instantly recognizable name, like General Motors or General Electric. And the man charged with tackling that task is James Harvey, who took over in January as Transamerica's chief executive officer, replacing John Beckett, the company's long-time guiding father who has retired from the post, while continuing as chairman for another two years. ''Our goal is to build one of the great consumer names in the country, like General Electric,'' Mr. Harvey said. ''In the past the company simply hasn't been that well recognized.''

In 1958, G.P. Putnam's Sons published a novel that, because of its sensational theme - a grown man's unquenchable lust for a 12-year-old girl - was already the center of controversy both here and abroad. Its author was Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian emigre and a professor of literature at Cornell, and the book had the distinct commercial advantage of having spurred the French authorities, no less, to pronounce it obscene when it was published in Paris three years earlier. The novel was in the form of a diary-cum-confession written by its protagonist, a middle-aged scholar named Humbert Humbert, setting down the sometimes erotic, often hilarious, frequently bizarre details of his doomed love affair with Dolores ''Lolita'' Haze, the sensuous pubescent girl he dubbed his ''nymphet,'' his coinage for the child-temptress, ''the little deadly demon among the wholesome children.'' The nymphet, Humbert said, could not be discerned by a normal man, but only by ''an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in (his) loins.'' Condemned as salacious trash by some critics but praised as a masterpiece by many others, Nabokov's ''Lolita'' became an instant best-seller and soon gained wide recognition as one of the classics of modern literature - a brilliant evocation of one man's obsessional search for paradise lost amid the wilderness of roadside America.

sharing organization formed last fall to serve Westchester and Connecticut, starts service on its first three routes tomorrow - a week after receiving approval from the Connecticut Department of Transportation to tap Federal Highway Administration funds for up to 75 percent of its operating budget. According to Michael J. Breen, chief operating officer, the Metropool car pool service, which he regards as ''a partnership between the private and public sectors,'' will use the Federal funds as necessary to augment private contributions from Metropool member corporations to its first year's budget of $302,000. Mr. Breen, who met last week with Richard Bradley, deputy commissioner of Connecticut's Department of Transportation, and with several companies in Westchester and Connecticut that wish to help employees get to and from work, said he hoped Metropool would be entirely privately financed in five years. ''Meanwhile,'' he said, ''Federal highway funds allocated to the State of Connecticut would have lapsed and been returned to Washington, since there were insufficient programs in the state to match them as required.'' Mr. Breen said no Federal money had yet been used by Metropool, which was formed last September by the Southwestern Area Commerce and Industry Association and ''seeded'' by about $100,000 in contributions from 10 major corporations, situated mainly in the Stamford area.

Even before it has penciled in its overall foreign policy outlook and goals, the Reagan Administration has chosen to draw the line against ''Soviet expansionism'' in the turbulent third world in El Salvador. Pursuing a major diplomatic offensive aimed at friendly Latin American and West European governments as well as the United States public, the Administration last week published a ''white paper'' to support its charge that Salvadoran revolutionaries have received tons of arms from the Soviet bloc. According to Pentagon sources, plans have been prepared to increase military aid to the Salvadoran junta, currently $10.4 million, by up to $40 million, and said it was prepared to send about 50 noncombat military advisers to join 19 already there. Asked if the United States would consider a naval blockade of Cuba to stop arms shipments to the Salvadoran guerrillas, Chief White House policy adviser Edwin Meese 3d said, ''I don't think we would rule out anything.'' At a news conference, President Reagan said he had ''no intention'' of involving the United States in another Vietnam and, indeed, it seemed the Administration had decided to intervene in El Salvador precisely because the situation there was so different from Vietnam. Defeating a small Marxist-led insurgency in the United States' backyard seemed an easily ''winnable'' test of the Reagan Administration's determination to, in the words of Mr. Meese, ''stop the expansion of Communism throughout the world.''