What was going on when I was born?

If consumers are to lead the economy out of recession during the third quarter, the trek did not start in July. New cars have not been moving well, and general merchandise sales have been soft.

WASHINGTON AWhite House official sat in his office the other day, talking quietly but intently about the relationship between his boss, Ronald Reagan, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. ''The President has let his impatience with Begin show in private several times in the past year,'' the official said. ''But this week, his patience ran out.'' The straw that broke the President's public reserve came late Tuesday night. Just 36 hours after Mr. Reagan had appealed personally for restraint in a White House meeting with Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir and just as American envoy Philip C. Habib seemed to be getting somewhere in Beirut, Israeli tanks rolled across the Green Line in the Lebanese capital. The Israeli advance on the Palestinian enclave was accompanied by the most withering and deadly artillery barrage of the two-month-old war.

JERSEY CITY A movement by his political foes to have Mayor Gerald McCann recalled has apparently run out of steam. It has been replaced by a drive to change the form of city government here from Mayor-Council back to City Commission. If the leaders of the drive can collect 10,000 signatures - they reportedly have about 3,000 - the question would be placed before the voters. If they approve, a new city election under the commission form of government would be held.

TIME was when visitors to Fire Island, escaping from the normal city fauna of mice and cockroaches, would thrill to the sight of a mere cottontail rabbit thrusting a nose out from under a beach plum bush. The stakes are much bigger now. Rabbits are nothing. Now it is deer bounding, great spreads of antlers and all, right through some of the established communities. At first they were a welcome sight of wild nature to those dulled by the city's concrete vistas. People who had spotted a deer reported their sightings excitedly as if they had come upon the rarest of creatures. Gradually the novelty wore off. People became so blase that they crowed only if they saw a herd of three or more. Then the resentment set in, especialy among gardeners who had laboriously hauled seaweed up from the bay as a mulch to help coax vegetables and flowers from the island's sand.

LAST year, a 39-year-old business executive from Hunterdon County began having impotency problems. Within three months, he was totally impotent. Although it is estimated that up to 10 percent of all men are impotent at some time in their lives, the problem is believed to be, most often, psychological and temporary. The executive - call him Ralph -and his wife thought so, too. Like some five million other American men, he was a diabetic, but his health was generally good and he and his wife had always enjoyed a satisfactory sexual relationship.

President Reagan is warning his allies in Congress that failure to pass tax increases this year would be ''devastating'' to the economy and to Republican prospects in the November election, according to Administration officials. The President is facing his most serious Republican revolt since taking office in trying to win support for the increases. Somewhat belatedly, the officials said in interviews, Mr. Reagan realized this week that only a major personal effort on his part, comparable to the lobbying campaigns he conducted last year in behalf of his tax and spending cuts, would save the tax measure. The bill would raise $98.5 billion in the next three years.

With the decline of America's industrial midsection and its once proud steel and automobile factories, Americans are increasingly looking to high technology as the key to saving their states and businesses. But a study of the two regions where high technology industry has enjoyed its most spectacular expansion, the arc of Route 128 around the rim of Boston and the electronics industry area south of San Francisco, suggests that their success may be hard for other states to emulate. A series of special, interrelated factors appear to have helped these areas thrive: - Close ties between a major research university and new high technology companies in the area. While the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University in California, encouraged their professors to work for local businesses, many other colleges have disdained such activity as crass commercialism. - A favorable climate or geography and attractive cultural amenities to lure the bright young engineers who form the backbone of high technology companies. Proximity to raw materials, such as coal and iron ore, and easy access to large markets that long gave the Middle West an advantage are not so important as brain power.

IN the Fair Haven neighborhood on the east side of New Haven, people with complaints against their landlords, trespassers or even a barking dog may end up bringing their grievances before their own neighbors, instead of appealing to the police or the courts. The Fair Haven Community Mediation Program, an extension of the city's criminal justice system, is now training a second group of residents to listen to disputes, take testimony from witnesses, seek solutions and, most importantly, avoid traditional court processes for petty offenses. ''We've only been operating since December of last year, but we've had plenty of successes so far,'' said Carol Anastasio, the program's director. About two dozen complaints have been sucessfully mediated so far, she said. She noted the program's particular success in a husband-wife dispute that had disturbed the neighborhood, and in cases of vandalism by teen-agers.

A BIT of fiscal history has come to the aid of 135 communities in the state in recent weeks, but like a youngster receiving a quarter from a visiting uncle, the localities are expressing less than overwhelming appreciation. And while the uncle might extoll the virtue of how thrift and investment might make that quarter grow over the years, the gift to the communities might indeed make one speculate about prudent investment. ''Ah, if only it could have been invested and reinvested we could almost pay off the national debt,'' said John Tedesco, a supervisor in the state's Office of Policy and Management. The money in question is $764,670, which the 135 Connecticut communities that existed in 1836 have held collectively for 146 years.

AUTUMN By A.G. Mojtabai. 140 pp. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. $9.95. DRIVING alone in the evening, returning from a trip, liking the idea of the family meal ahead, I have been attacked once or twice in my time by melodrama. Thoughts regarding the nature of aloneness. Reflections on what it would be like to know, as one drove, that the house up the road had necessarily to be empty. Turning the radio back on and listening again to the first-round golf scores from somewhere sets the mind on a better course, but there's still a bit of unease. Certainly you forget quickly the names of the players who didn't make the cut. A.G. Mojtabai's fourth novel speaks with force and clarity to the sort of unease I mention. A short, quiet-voiced tale, it describes a few days in the life of a recently widowed 66-year-old accountant named Will Ross - a man under pressure to move out of the Maine seacoast cottage he and his wife had imagined, during 20 years of summer vacations, as their probable retirement home. The key to the book's value lies in its alertness to the varieties of feeling awakened in those newly alone.

Sick Stocks These days, even good news is bad news for the stock market. Recent declines in key short-term interest rates - the kind of development that should send positive vibrations through the equities market - have not been well received by investors, who continue to sell shares.

In a new effort to win a larger portion of the rapidly growing revenues from pay television, three of Hollywood's six largest movie studios are going to become partners in an all-movie pay-television network, those close to the deal said yesterday. The three studios - Paramount Pictures, MCA Inc. and Warner Brothers - would become partners in ''The Movie Channel'' - a 24-hour cable network that reaches two million subscribers and is owned by Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment, a joint venture between American Express and Warner Communications, the parent company of Warner Brothers. The deal is expected to be made public this week, and it represents the second attempt by major studios in two years to compete more effectively with Home Box Office, the dominant paytelevision network with about nine million subscribers.