What was going on when I was born?

Cane Garden Bay is a curve of white sand. A tin-roofed shed sheltering a few tables stands on the beach; a steel band practices on the sand nearby. An old automobile tire hangs on a rope from a palm tree. ''A good time awaits you at Stanley's Welcome Bar,'' reads the sign above the shed's open front. The place is a visual cliche. Humphrey Bogart, unshaven, should be slouched there, tilting up a bottle of beer. But it was I who was tilting up the bottle of beer, while my wife, Beth, sipped a Coke. A new acquaintance, 7-year-old Jessica Moore of Schenectady, was swinging in the tire. We were on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, 60 miles east of Puerto Rico, and we were all having a terrific time. A ride in a tire attached to a palm tree is about as much swinging as Tortola provides, which was fine with Beth and me. I had packed a dozen paperback books and five shirts when we had set out for a quiet two-week wallow in the winter sun of the Caribbean. It turned out that I had too many shirts and not enough books.

NORFOLK, CONN. AS A result of bureaucratic confusion over jurisdiction involving almost a dozen agencies in New Jersey, Connecticut and the Federal Government, 28 retarded children in a home for the handicapped here are not receiving the kinds of comprehensive therapy and education that are required by Federal law. The children, who are from New Jersey, were placed in the home, Ann Storck's Nursery, because New Jersey does not have facilities for them. But Connecticut refuses to provide the mandated level of education because, it says, New Jersey has refused to pay for the youngsters' tuition.

A year after its inception, El Salvador's bold and disputed land redistribution program is taking hold. The first crops are in and, despite predictions of economic disaster, the harvests on newly formed cooperatives were about the same as they were last year under the former owners. Perhaps more important, the American-aided program appears to be fulfilling its political objectives of undercutting the power of rightist oligarchs and winning peasants from leftist guerrillas. Right-wing efforts to undermine the program by assassinating peasant leaders and Government officials - including the Salvadoran head of the program and two American advisers in January -have proved futile and appear to have stopped. Second Phase Has Begun The largest plantations have already been expropriated, turning over 15 percent of the country's farmland to the cooperatives, which have 10 to 15 percent of the rural population. A second phase, begun last month, is turning over to sharecroppers the small plots they farm.

New York State's unemployment insurance fund, hard hit by recessionary periods of the last six years, is critically low, prompting labor and business groups to call for legislation to keep the fund from insolvency. Despite employer tax payments to the fund of more than $1 billion a year in the last few years, New York's unemployment rate, which rose to more than 10 percent in the mid-1970's, has seriously depleted the fund, a situation that is typical of large industrial states. At the end of 1970, the fund stood at $1.6 billion; last year it was $482 million. Although the unemployment tax is one of the costliest levies on business, current tax formulas have not been adequate to produce an adequate reserve. Experts at the State Department of Labor say that the fund, as it is currently financed, would not be sufficient to cope with another recessive period, or pay the higher jobless benefits sought by labor unions.

IN Louisiana, welfare recipients were once given the task of beating snakes to death to earn their state payments. In California and New York, in Utah and Massachussetts, the jobs given to welfare recipients were less exotic - school crossing guards, baby sitters, lunchroom aides, park sweepers and school bus helpers. To Reagan Administration officials, the proposal last week to create a national ''workfare'' program that ties welfare benefits to a 20-hour-a-week work requirement has a dual purpose: to fill neighborhood needs and, perhaps more important, to provide ''valuable training and self-esteem'' to welfare recipients. As many as 800,000 of the more than 3 million adults, mostly women, in the Aid For Dependent Children program are expected to be involved.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- JERRY KLEIN is on the staff of The Peoria Journal Star. By JERRY KLEIN A genteel voyage into a 10-mile-an-hour world that has pretty much vanished has been drawing travelers to Peoria, Ill., for a two-day, 152-mile Illinois River packetboat trip. That nothing very dramatic happens during the trip aboard the steamboat Julia Belle Swain is only part of the excursion's charm. Crowded airports and fast food seem miles away once passengers lapse into the slow river routine and become attuned to the hypnotic rhythm of the steam engines. The $125-a-person price tag covers the trip, overnight lodging at Starved Rock State Park, meals, entertainment and ground transportion on a doubledecker London bus. My wife, Mary, and I signed up for the Starved Rock excursion one day last summer. The Julia Belle leaves Peoria's downtown riverfront every Monday morning at 9, signaling her departure with a quavery, two-tone blast from her steam whistle. We took a few minutes to explore the boat before settling down into our lounge chairs to watch the panorama of the river unfold before us.

JERSEY CITY SELDOM is New Jersey able to steal a march on New York City, but that's what is happening today as six St. Patrick's Day parades step off as a tuneup for the big Fifth Avenue event on Tuesday. The parades, and two that were held yesterday, are the highlights of a series of Irish-related events that have been going on in the state since early March. There have been music programs, dinners, poetry readings and even masses as the state's approximately two million people of Irish descent observe the pre-spring ritual of homage to their roots and the patron of the Emerald Isle. The Irish held parades in Wharton and Nutley yesterday. And today, the wearing of the green and the skirling of the Kerry pipers are scheduled for Newark, Jersey City, Kearny, West Orange, Belmar and Woodbridge.

Five more cooperative conversion plans appeared in Riverdale in the last few weeks, causing no surprise among apartment-house tenants. The plans, with the red lettering that has made them known as ''red herrings,'' have become a familiar sight in the sedate northwest corner of the Bronx. In dozens of solid residential neighborhoods in Manhattan and Queens, co-op conversions have been proceeding apace for several years. But in Riverdale they were rare until two years ago, and in the last 12 months a modest movement toward co-ops there has turned into a tidal wave. Nowhere else in the city has such a concentration of cooperative offerings been experienced. The office of State Attorney General Robert Abrams, to which plans for co-op conversion must be submitted, has been swamped by them and is hard pressed to keep up with the job of scrutinizing each one, principally to assure that full disclosure of all relevant facts is made to prospective buyers. Early this month 39 plans for Riverdale buildings were reported on hand, of which 12 had been accepted, giving sponsors the right to begin selling apartments. However, realestate agents and tenants say that plans have been circulated in half a dozen other buildings.

THE WHITE HOTEL By D.M. Thomas. 274 pp. New York: The Viking Press. $12.95. This novel is so remarkable in conception and unusual in structure that I think it best at the outset to describe, in the most straightforward way, what happens in it. We begin with a series of fictional letters to, from or about Sigmund Freud - letters that soon come to focus upon one of his patients, or rather upon two of her ''pornographic writings,'' which under the spell of ''a severe sexual hysteria'' (to quote the imaginary Freud) she produced during the course of her treatment. These two compositions, one verse, the other prose, make up the next section of the book. In a sense they are letters, too - love letters from patient to doctor, since they describe with much erotic detail a fantasized affair with none other than Freud's son Martin (''I was split open/by your son/Professor''). It is from the lakeside resort where this dream-affair took place that the title of the novel is derived.

Ellen Wynn was worried. The building on Manhattan's East Side where she rented an apartment was going through cooperative conversion. Miss Wynn did not have the money nor did she know anyone who could lend her the money to purchase the studio apartment at the insider's price of $45,000. Under the co-op conversion plan, she would be evicted when her lease expired and show no financial profit from letting the apartment revert to her landlord. But then she saw an advertisement in a newspaper that read: ''Is your building going co-op? If you do not wish to buy your apartment, we do! You can profit from your building's conversion by selling us your tenant's rights.'' After calling the number listed in the advertisement, she did just that: she sold her tenant's rights to purchase the apartment to an individual who, in turn, sold the apartment to a client. Miss Wynn, who lived at Plaza 400 on East 56th Street, and did not want her real name used, was paid $10,000 for her tenant's rights. After selling she moved to Hoboken, N.J. Her apartment was sold for $85,000 on the open market.

Five senior South African military officers arrived in Washington this week using visas that Reagan Administration officials said they had obtained without having identified themselves as military men. They were to depart tonight after the State Department raised questions about their status. The Administration said the five officers had applied for diplomatic visas through the American Embassy in Pretoria under what one official called ''misleading circumstances.'' The South African Foreign Ministry was said to have asked that they be given visas to consult with the South African Embassy in Washington.

PLANS for dealing with disruptions to Conrail passenger service resulting from power shortages on its New Haven line are being developed by state and railroad officials. The New Haven, a commuter operation serving 40,000 daily riders daily between Connecticut, Westchester and mid-Manhattan, has been singled out for the study because, according to Robert E. Van Wagoner, a railroad spokesman, "its power situation is more precarious" than the Hudson or Harlem Divisions, the strictly New York branches of Conrail's commuter operation. Conrail's general manager, Joseph F. Spreng, conceded last December that the New Haven was in a "crisis" and that an essential, long-awaited modernization, including conversion of the line's power supply from its own power stations to commercial sources, was four years from completion. The railroad has been plagued for years by delays caused by electricpower problems that have been traced to its aging power plant at Cos Cob, Conn., and its West Farms substation in the Bronx. Both facilities are scheduled to be phased out as part of the modernization, according to Conrail.