What was going on when I was born?

Spirits & the Law Arcade Now Is a Street New York State says you cannot sell alcohol for consumption on the premises if your premises are on the same street and within 200 feet of a church. Now, the Cafe Galleria - in the covered arcade of the Galleria building that runs from East 57th to East 58th Street - and the Chapel of Saints Faith, Hope and Charity, at 128 East 58th, are more than 200 feet apart.

The Soviet Union, in response to an American proposal at the Geneva talks on reducing strategic nuclear arms, has offered to make substantial cuts in its long-range missile and bomber forces, according to Administration officials. But in return, the officials said, Moscow is demanding that the United States agree to forgo the deployment of new medium-range missiles in Europe and to accept stringent restrictions on all future cruise missile deployments. Administration officials called the Soviet proposal unacceptable, noting that it fell far short of the proposal made by President Reagan in May for considerably deeper reductions in long-range, or intercontinental, missiles. But the officials said neither side had formally rejected the proposals of the other. The talks began in Geneva on June 29, and the first round is expected to be adjourned in mid-August.

MANY mortgages written today have a feature called negative a mortization or deferred interest - or, as one confounded New Jersey h ome buyer recently dubbed it, ''a mortgage with mirrors.'' With negative amortization, the home buyer is borrowing not only the money he needs to purchase his house but also the difference between what the payments would be at the going interest rate and what he can conveniently pay. Each month's shortfall is added to the principal of the mortgage and thus, instead of amortizing it - that is, paying it off - the borrower is making it larger. Hence the name, negative amortization.

Although I haven't yet found out where drama critics go to die, I do know where they go to be reborn. The place is The O'Neill Theater Center in Waterford, Conn., a sprawling complex of stages and dormitories nestled against Long Island Sound, a few miles from the family home of America's greatest playwright. It is here each year that critics, among many others, come to see a dozen or so new plays, mostly by unsung authors, in staged readings performed during a month-long National Playwrights Conference. And it is here where even the most hardened theatergoers, beaten down by the disappointments of the previous New York season, can suddenly be revivified by the sound of a vibrant dramatic voice, crying out insistently into a midsummer's night.

'Fact Book 1982' Eye Opener Ripley's ''Believe It or Not'' it is not, but the ''Fact Book 1982'' that is about to be published by the Real Estate Board of New York will contain in its charts and tables some information that may raise eyebrows. For example, there are those who believe the ratio of housing to population has never been worse in the city - only 2.95 million units for 7.02 million people, as counted in the 1980 census.

THERE was a time Richard Hendler ran out of ice at his home. ''I cried,'' he said. ''Then I went next door to borrow some from my neighbors. They laughed. They couldn't believe it.'' Mr. Hendler generally has a lot of ice on hand - about 800 tons in reserve at any one time, in addition to the 120 tons he makes each day. And if he ever runs low on that supply, as happens on very rare occasions, usually hot summer weekends, a lot of people in Westchester suffer. That's because, for much of the metropolitan area, Mr. Hendler is the iceman, a title that he bears with a considerable amount of pride. ''Iceman? He's the king of ice,'' proclaimed Dominick Liso of Nyack, one of a stream of ice distributors who daily pay homage to Mr. Hendler at his castle, a graying white rectangular building in the industrial section of Mamaroneck bearing the regal title of the Saxony Ice Company. ''He's the best there is,'' agreed Mr. Liso's ''friendly competitor,'' Marvin Adelman, who usually sends three trucks over from Rockland each day to pick up 1,200 to 1,400 bags of ice cubes plus a quantity of block ice. ''He's got the best ice. But it's more than the ice, it's the man.''

BEDMINSTER ABRIGHTLY colored circus tent is being erected near the stallion barn at the 400-acre Lana Lobell Farm in this picturesque Somerset County community. Next Sunday, the day after the Hambletonian is run at the Meadowlands Race Track in East Rutherford, Alan Leavitt, owner of the farm, will conduct the second Lana Lobell yearling sale. ''Starting at 5 P.M., we're selling our entire 1982 crop of 199 colts and fillies,'' he said. A decade ago, only 150 standardbred mares were bred in New Jersey; this year, there will be more than 3,000. The breeding of horses has become a big business in the state, with most of the largest farms situated in Somerset, Warren and Hunterdon Counties. Aside from sales, owners enter their horses in thoroughbred (flat) and standardbred (trotting and pacing) races all over the country, and many have come off with top honors.

Despite systematic police surveillance and the jailing of organizers, South Africa's new black labor unions are steadily expanding their membership and making themselves felt as a force in South African industry. From the standpoint of factories organized, the black union movement is still in an early stage. But the outlines of what could some day become an important power base can already be seen. The potential significance of this development is obvious to all. So is its rarity. There is no other secular sphere in the heavily regulated lives of black South Africans in which they are permitted to build national organizations.

AUNT JULIA AND THE SCRIPTWRITER By Mario Vargas Llosa. Translated by Helen R. Lane. 374 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $16.50. AND now for something entirely different from Latin America: a comic novel that is genuinely funny. This screwball fantasy - interwoven with a realistic tale of an improbable romance - is the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's homage to two people who gave shape to his artistic and personal life during his adolescence: an ascetic Bolivian who all day, every day, wrote scripts for radio soap operas, and the author's Aunt Julia. The two become marvelous fictional creations in a novel that was originally conceived as half-autobiographical, and elements of autobiography still cling to it. The narrator is a young man named Mario, sometimes called Varguitas, which is a diminutive of the author's surname. The narrator precociously courts and marries his delectable Aunt Julia, as did Vargas Llosa, whose first wife was an aunt (but not a blood relative) named Julia.This book is dedicated to her. Also, Vargas Llosa, as a young radio newsman in Lima in 1953, worked with a singular Bolivian named Raul Salmon, and he has said that he based his fictional scriptwriter, Pedro Camacho, on Salmon.

The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to propose new regulations soon to speed the reduction of lead in gasoline, according to a high-ranking official in the agency. The agency is scrapping earlier plans to drop or weaken the rules, the official said. The official disclosed that Kathleen M. Bennett, Assistant Administrator for Air, Noise and Radiation, had proposed new rules designed to remove 31 percent more lead from the air over the next eight years than would be removed under current regulations. The proposal is somewhat surprising to environmentalists, coming from an Administration that has emphasized deregulation and the decreasing of Federal powers. It seems to defer to environmental and medical opinion previously resisted by the Administration: that lead in the air is directly linked to human health.

Israeli armored troops launched a predawn assault today on Palestinian guerrilla positions around Beirut international airport on the southern outskirts of the city, the Palestine Liberation Organization news agency Wafa reported. The state-run Beirut radio said Israeli forces had entered the airport, bringing them only a few hundred yards from the largest Palestinian refugee camp of Burj al-Brajneh. in what appeared to be an advance on the Palestinians or toward the Palestinian refugee camps just south of the airport. The Israeli attack came hours after Lebanon's Foreign Minister said Saturday that final negotiations on how to carry out a withdrawal of the P.L.O. guerrillas from west Beirut were expected to begin within 24 hours. Foreign Minister Fuad Butros, speaking to reporters after a meeting with Philp C. Habib, the special American envoy, Prime Minister Shafik al-Wazzan and President Elias Sarkis, said the negotiations would involve the P.L.O., the Lebanese Government and Mr. Habib acting through Lebanese intermediaries.

WASHINGTON Amonth ago, as victorious Israeli forces cornered the Palestine Liberation Organization in west Beirut, some politicians, columnists and a few Government officials were tempted to think the Israeli triumph had provided a dramatic opportunity to move toward a broad political settlement in the Middle East. The idea gained currency as Secretary of State George P. Shultz canvassed experienced outsiders such as former Secretary Henry A. Kissinger for their suggestions on longer-term strategy. Palestinian leaders dropped hints of concessions and maneuvered for political recognition as a price for evacuating west Beirut. At the United Nations, Egypt and France circulated an ambitious blueprint for the future of Lebanon, the West Bank and Arab-Israeli peace. ''You have to have a package'' that would link a solution in west Beirut to broader political issues, advised Ashraf Ghorbal, the Egyptian Ambassador in Washington. ''In the Middle East, you have to move when the right time comes. The world keeps missing opportunities for peace in the Middle East.''