What was going on when I was born?

WASHINGTON CELEBRATING was muted today as the last Israelis withdrew from Sinai, marking 37 months since the peace treaty with Egypt was signed. The early euphoria after the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty was sealed in Washington had long since dissipated, but it still retains enormous political and military importance. The treaty demonstrated that at least one Arab state was ready to live in peace with Israel. Jerusalem's concerns at the prospect of having to fight another war on all frontiers at once were sharply reduced.

The Price of Deflation As the chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors noted last week, dramatic declines in inflation - the Consumer Price Index actually fell at a 3.3 percent annual rate last month - are helping to stretch the consumer's dollar. And, with inventories all but liquidated and the July tax cuts not far off, the building blocks of a recovery seem to be falling in place. Unfortunately, good news for consumers has meant misery to companies: With unit labor costs rising at a faster rate than prices, corporate profits are tumbling, discouraging future investment. The longer that continues, the more unlikely a sustainable upturn becomes.

''It's just incredible, these one-run games,'' Manager George Bamberger said today after the Mets had played a onerun game for the eighth time this season and the fifth straight time against the Expos. The Mets won this one, 1-0, on a seventh-inning double by John Stearns that scored Gary Rajsich. ''Just a great game,'' said Bamberger, after the Mets had scored their second victory in the one-run games against the Expos and their fourth in the eight over all. Bamberger was exulting over his decision to promote Charlie Puleo to a new four-pitcher rotation that also includes Pat Zachry, Mike Scott and Randy Jones. Puleo, a right-hander who attended Bloomfield (N.J.) High School and Seton Hall University, gave up only three hits in six and one-third innings.

LAST fall Dan McKechnie, a 26-year-old teacher in Irvine, Calif., took out a personal loan of $15,000 to buy his sixth-graders two computer keyboards, six monitors, one printer, two disk drives and $10,000 worth of software. Now Mr. McKechnie moonlights as a video producer to pay back his loan. ''It's worth every penny of that loan,'' he said, ''to see the excitement in my kids' eyes and witness the growth they've experienced as the result of working with a microcomputer.'' Across the country, in Philadelphia, Grover Washington Jr., the Grammy award-winning jazz musician, auctioned off the opportunity to play with his band on his next record album in order to buy a microcomputer for his children's school, Friends' Central. He also persuaded another member of the community, Julius Erving, to donate a pair of autographed basketball sneakers to the cause. One of the famous Dr. J's shoes, size 15 1/2, raised $200 for computers.

The Detroit Tigers, the hottest team in the American League, staged a multifaceted show at Yankee Stadium yesterday. They unleashed a three-homer barrage against Doyle Alexander, and they punctuated their 7-2 victory over the Yankees with an incident involving their manager and their star player that was reminiscent of the Reggie Jackson-Billy Martin drama in Boston five years ago. Jerry Turner and Kirk Gibson, Manager Sparky Anderson's star players, each hit a bases-empty home run, and Larry Herndon added a three-run shot as the Tigers, who lead the American League East with an 11-5 record, gained their eighth straight victory. For the Yankees, 5-8 over all, it was their fifth defeat in five games at the Stadium this season.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's select crisis Cabinet Saturday night held its longest meeting since the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, after the return of Foreign Secretary Francis Pym from two days of talks in Washington. As he left the three-hour session at 10 Downing Street, Mr. Pym would say only that ''we have been considering my time in Washington and what happened there.'' For the first time, the group included Sir Michael Havers, the Attorney General. Saturday morning, Mr. Pym said he reported ''a bit of progress'' to the Prime Minister in his meetings with Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. But British officials cautioned that the outcome of the trip could not be described as anything like a breakthrough and that Britain and Argentina remained far apart.

Inflation wiped out virtually all the gains that American families achieved through higher earnings in the 1970's, while the distribution of income became slightly more unequal, according to the Census Bureau. Real family income, excluding the effects of inflation, rose rapidly from 1960 to 1970 but was virtually unchanged from 1970 to 1980, the bureau said in a report. From 1960 to 1970, median family income, adjusted for inflation, rose to $20,939 from $15,637, and in 1980 it stood at $21,023, the Census Bureau found. Half of all families have income above the median, and half are below the median. All the income statistics were given in constant 1980 dollars, meaning that they were adjusted for increases in consumer prices.

WASHINGTON EVERYONE is running, but no one knows where. Everyone knows when, but no one knows against whom. The rules are clear but the boundaries are not. It is not a new-fangled board game or a marathon still in the planning stages. It is the 1982 elections, and the problem is that Congressional districts have yet to be redrawn to reflect the decline in New York State's population.

When Pepsi-Cola's bottling franchise in Hong Kong shut down last year, the corporation looked at the cheaper wages, rents and taxes just across the border in China and decided to spend $5.5 million to relocate here. A modern new plant, which can produce 4.8 million cases of bottled and canned soft drinks a year, began operating last month with 35 Chinese employees. The American-made concentrate is trucked into Shenzhen, mixed with Chinese sugar and water, and trucked back dutyfree into Hong Kong for customers there and elsewhere in Asia. There are hopes of eventu-ally selling Pepsi-Cola, which translates phonetically into Chinese as ''one hundred things happiness,'' to the Chinese themselves. The workers, who are paid a third of the going wages in Hong Kong, had to be taught how to run an American assembly line. ''From the beginning, they didn't know what to do, but when we trained them, they picked it up fast,'' said Lim Mon Foo, Singapore-based operations and marketing manager. ''Of course, there are a few who need some more supervision, but they can keep up.''

IF you are trying to sell your house and you have an old, l owinterest mortgage, you probably think that a buyer cannot assume t he mortgage if there is a ''due-on-sale'' clause written into the c ontract. The clause clearly says the lender can demand immediate p ayment of the entire debt if the house is sold. The mortgage is t hus nonassumable, right? Not necessarily: Thanks to the convolutions of the secondary mortgage market, that nonassumable mortgage may have become a desirable assumable mortgage.

THE osprey, an endangered species in New York State for the last decade, has rebounded dramatically on the Island's East End, one of two areas in the state where osprey nests were once relatively common. So impressive are the population gains that the State Department of Environmental Conservation is planning to remove the majestic fish-eating hawks from the state's endangered-species list and place them instead on a list of threatened species. Further, according to Peter Nye, the director of the Environmental Conservation Department's endangered-species unit, six ospreys hatched in East End nests were transported to Cattaraugus County in western New York State over the last two years to be nurtured to maturity, or ''hacked,'' by conservation officials and volunteers. The goal is to establish a new osprey colony. Efforts to sustain ospreys unfold as biologists predict that one million plant and animal species will become extinct around the world by the end of the century unless swift action is taken to protect habitats.

STAMFORD FRANK MARZULLO'S is a success measured in misery. People come to the Community of St. Luke here, which Mr. Marzullo directs, because they are hungry, homeless or both. The Community houses and feeds them, sells them clothing and food at reduced prices, even arranges to send their children to summer camp. And for the affluent people who surround the South End, the troubled Stamford neighborhood that is home to the Community of St. Luke, it is a reminder that need persists in their own backyards. Mr. Marzullo does not dispute the fact that problems and shortcomings plague the Community of St. Luke, nor that there is more work ahead. But after 18 months of operation, and the first anniversary of the Community's emergency housing shelter, he ventured an unequivocal verdict.