What was going on when I was born?

Americans had every reason to be bothered and bewildered by the economic news last week. The unemployment rate hit 10.1 percent in September, the first time it had reached double-digit figures since the end of the Great Depression. But Wall Street was engaged in a wild flurry of trading, with hundreds of millions of shares changing hands and stock and bond prices spurting upward. What did it mean? Did the rally in the securities markets signal that the recession of 1981-82 was ''turning the corner'' back to prosperity? Or was the return of double-digit unemployment the harbinger of another depression?

As joblessness hit a post-Depression high last week, President Reagan traveled the country doing what he could to keep fellow Republicans employed in Congress. He tirelessly blamed Democrats for the conditions that led to 10.1 percent of the workforce being without work, accused them of turning the issue into a ''political football,'' of all things, and then signed a two-year-old, Democratic-sponsored, Carter-endorsed bill that he said would create hundreds of thousands of jobs. Democrats spoke of the ''tragedy'' of 11.3 million people unemployed and the ''bankruptcy'' of Reaganomics - and bandied estimates of how many new Democratic Congressmen would ride to power on the tide of misery. A tidy but ordinary midterm gain of 15 to 20 seats had been anticipated, but some doubled those estimates when the double-digit joblessness for September was confirmed.

The St. Louis Cardinals moved within one game of the National League pennant tonight when they tied the Atlanta Braves in the eighth inning and defeated them in the ninth, 4-3. It was the second straight victory for the Cardinals in a playoff that has twice been postponed by rain. They even withstood six innings of knuckleball pitching by Phil Niekro, the 43-year-old ace of the Atlanta staff, who worked with only two days of rest and left with a 3-2 lead. But in the final two innings, after Bruce Sutter came out of the bullpen and stopped the Braves cold, the Cardinals revived. And they revived against Gene Garber, who saved 30 games this year as the Braves' best relief pitcher.

A Tolerant Fed? The Federal Reserve is cashing in the chips that it has earned since October 1979 - a three-year period during which a mostly restrictive monetary policy succeeded in subduing inflation. The Fed is faced now with money supply data that will probably remain above its targets. But the bank does not want to wrench the money supply downward, because, many say, an economy with a 10.1 percent unemployment rate would suffer too much pain from higher interest rates. By reducing the discount rate again last week, the Fed signaled that it has decided to be tolerant of both the past and prospective increases in money supply growth. Not only would that policy encourage the lower interest rates that economists say are needed for a sustainable recovery, but it might also defuse political criticism of the Fed in advance of the November elections.

CRANFORD THE sixth annual New Jersey Science Convention took place here last week against a backdrop of crisis stemming from the exodus of teachers into higher-paying jobs in industry. More than 1,300 science teachers and supervisors attended the twoday event, which was co-sponsored by the New Jersey Science Teachers Association and the New Jersey Science Supervisors Association. They crowded enthusiastically into 94 workshops on subjects ranging from microelectronics to ''Name That Fern.'' Even so, the dissatisfaction and concerns that science teachers are expressing across the country were evident. Like other parts of the nation, New Jersey is confronted by a severe shortage of science instructors, not only because such teachers are fleeing to industry but also because few students are entering the science-education field.

PITTSBURGH EVEN now, the quarterback is getting all the attention. A photographer from Newsweek was in town last week to take some glossy pinups of Dan Marino, all part of the continuing publicity campaign that began during the preseason when Marino was touted for the Heisman Trophy. Well, trophies have been the last thing on his mind recently. Instead of cheers, Marino has heard some notes of discord on ''The Hill'' where the University of Pittsburgh is situated. There have been rumors about the condition of his right arm and questions about his ability to run the University of Pittsburgh offense. It has been suggested that Marino misses Jackie Sherrill, the former coach, who went to Texas A&M. Sherrill was known to favor the offense. He would get together with the defense, observers say, about as often as distant relatives meet. ''Anytime the offense moved the ball against the defense, it was a great practice,'' said Tom Flynn, the starting free safety. ''Coach Sherrill would start complaining about us having a bad day when the defense was good.'' Perhaps that is to be expected. The offense is the glamorous side of football, conjuring visions of dashing running backs, receivers with Olympian speed and daring young quarterbacks who look like Robert Redford or Errol Flynn.

JAMES A. BOERST was 39 years old with a business he cherished, a loving wife, two winning children and an irrepressible sense of humor. He also had incurable cancer. He had one especially close friend over the last two months of his life. She was Jackie Jones, married and the mother of two collegeage children, who came to know Mr. Boerst only as he was dying. She was assigned his case as a volunteer in the hospice program run jointly by the Northern Westchester Hospital Center and the District Nursing Association of Northern Westchester. The hospice, which originated in England, came to be a place where people went to die under tender care. The programs that bear the name today embody the concepts of care for the terminally ill that ease the way to death for patients and families and help them live as fully as possible until the end.

UNTIL two years ago, Ronald Apperson made his living as a musician, performing with the Hartford Symphony and teaching tuba at a handful of colleges around the state and southern Massachusetts. With 20 years of music experience, a master's degree and part of his doctoral studies behind him, Mr. Apperson was making less than $14,000 a year. That, combined with his wife's salary as a part-time medical technologist at Hartford Hospital, was not enough to raise two children on, the couple decided. So Mr. Apperson went back to school to learn computer electronics. These days, Mr. Apperson rises at 5 A.M. to practice his tuba for an hour and a half before going to a full-time job at Radio Shack's computer division. A performer at heart, he continues to play with the symphony, to teach and to perform as a freelance musician.

President Reagan, responding to the outlawing of the Solidarity labor union in Poland, announced today that he was going to suspend the favorable trade status that Poland has had for 22 years. The immediate effect of Mr. Reagan's suspending of Poland's mostfavored-nation status will be to raise tariffs on Polish exports of manufactured products but not farm products. Particularly affected would be textiles. Poland's exports have declined dramatically in the last year because of its faltering economy, and today's action was considered unlikely to have a drastic effect by itself.

The combination was unlikely, but it was deadly as far as the California Angels were concerned. Moose Haas, who had not started in four weeks, and Mark Brouhard, who had not played in four weeks, kept the Milwaukee Brewers alive today, leading them to a 9-5 victory over the California Angels and into a fifth and deciding game of the American League pennant playoff Sunday. The starting pitchers in that game, scheduled to begin at 4:20 P.M. Eastern standard time, will be Bruce Kison for California and Pete Vuckovich for Milwaukee. Kison beat Vuckovich, 4-2, last Wednesday night in the second game and gave the Angels a 2-0 lead in the series. But since the series shifted from California, the Brewers have won twice in County Stadium.

THE NAMES By Don DeLillo. 339 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $13.95. AMERICA is an irresistible theme for American writers. This preoccupation is not usually patriotic; indeed it has nothing much to do with a country at all. America, in this context, is not a place or a nation but a condition of the soul tied to a habit of the possession of power. Don DeLillo's first novel was called ''Americana.'' ''The Names,'' his seventh, is a dense, brilliant, ultimately rather elusive meditation on the relation of this half-mythological America to the historical world. A series of discreet markers gives us the time: ''This summer ... was the period after the Shah left Iran, before the hostages were taken.'' The principal settings of ''The Names'' are Greece and India, but the Americans in this novel mainly live in their own time and place, a sealed compartment, a subculture. They are executives of banks and insurance companies; they live in Athens, have lived in Teheran, Beirut, Cairo, Cyprus. They travel constantly to Turkey, Kuwait, Pakistan, Jordan, Zaire. ''It is like the Empire,'' one of them says. ''Opportunity, adventure, sunsets, dusty death.'' It is like tourism, another says: ''Errors and failings don't cling to you the way they do back home.'' Later we read: ''Americans used to come to places like this to write and paint and study, to find deeper textures. Now we do business.''

What might be called the second resurrection of ''Candide,'' Leonard Bernstein's frothy, ambitious musical setting of Voltaire, is scheduled to take place Wednesday night at the New York State Theater. If the New York City Opera's resurrection takes place as planned - in other words, if this new version is applauded by the critics and the public - then we may come a little closer to answering the question that has haunted ''Candide'' since its birth: Is it an opera, a musical, an operetta or some as yet unidentified mutation? Mr. Bernstein's musical, based on Voltaire's wittily cynical novel of an innocent youth's optimism through the most appalling tribulations, and of his undying love for his progressively more sullied Cunegonde, was conceived as an operetta, revived as a musical and now, just maybe, will come to life again on Wednesday as an opera, with more of the original music than has ever been heard before.