What was going on when I was born?

THREE years ago the Connecticut Opera was facing one of its bleakest seasons ever. With a $60,000 deficit for fiscal year 1979, the nation's sixth-oldest professional opera company had serious cash-flow problems, a five-year ticket sale slump and a 1,250-member subscriber list that had remained static for 35 years. After mounting the world's largest indoor production of Verdi's ''Aida'' at the Hartford Civic Center Coliseum last year, it now appears that the black days for the Connecticut Opera are over. Under the whirlwind stewardship of George Osborne, who assumed the general director's chair in July 1979, the Connecticut Opera has not only retired its deficit, but also has reported an increasing surplus three years in a row.

King Hassan II of Morocco said today that the Arab nations would recognize Israel, but only after Israel had withdrawn its forces from the territory occupied since the 1967 war. The King spoke at a news conference a day after he and a six-nation Arab League delegation had discussed differing Arab and American peace plans with President Reagan. ''You obviously realize that we have entered a new phase in the Arab-Israeli conflict, not the conflict of war but of law and of rights,'' the King said. 'To Live in Peace' ''Our presence here shows that we also want ourselves to live in peace with Israel,'' he added, speaking in French. At the White House on Friday, the Moroccan leader said he was confident that ''peace and coexistence'' could come to the region on the basis of the Reagan peace plan announced on Sept. 1, the eightpoint Arab declaration issued at the close of a meeting in Fez, Morocco, on Sept. 9, and longstanding United Nations Security Council resolutions.

PRESIDENT Reagan, the state of the economy, conservatism, Joseph M. Margiotta - and the advantages of incumbency - will be tested in five Congressional races on Long Island 10 days from now. Four Republican incumbents and a lone Democrat, Representative Thomas J. Downey, are seeking re-election to a shrunken Long Island delegation to the House of Representatives. Another incumbent, Representative Gregory W. Carman, is not seeking re-election because his district was eliminated in the reduction of the Island districts from six to five in the decennial reapportionment. The reduction is part of a statewide drop of five House members because New York's population remained stable in the last 10 years while other parts of the country had population booms. The Island has a small slice of another district - the Eighth District, which extends from northern Queens into Great Neck. Representative James H. Scheuer, a Democrat whose district was moved from southern Queens and southeastern Brooklyn in the reapportionment, does not even have a Republican opponent and is virtually assured of re-election.

Social historians looking for more evidence of Americans' growing passion for their past can take note of the fuss in Weston, Conn., over the fate of three 100-year-old barns there. Early this year, town officials decided to sell the dilapidated barns, which sit on town land, believing them to lack any significant historic value.

WASHINGTON WHITE HOUSE aides last week quietly ordered up some district-bydistrict analysis of what the expected or, for that matter, unexpected Republican losses will do to President Reagan's governing coalition in Congress. The aim of this research project is not to shape the outcome of the Nov. 2 election. Instead, Mr. Reagan's advisers want to be armed on Nov. 3 to answer journalists who ask where the President will get votes to sustain his economic program. As the White House exercise in preventive public relations suggests, this is the season of fear, hope and rank speculation. While Mr. Reagan's aides fret about the future of the conservative coalition in the House of Representatives, Democratic strategists wring their hands at the thought that the Republicans' superiority in campaign money and technological resources may blunt Democratic gains. On both sides, there is almost obsessive curiosity about the other's expectations. ''I hear that the Democrats are really beginning to smell blood,'' a senior Reagan aide observed last week. ''They're officially talking 25 to 30 seats. They're privately talking 35 to 40.'' But, the Reagan aide concluded, only ''an overall major shift'' of public opinion against the President could give the Democrats more than a gain of 40.

David Mamet was sipping tea in front of the fireplace in his Chelsea duplex, whose spacious living room sports original artwork and a baby grand piano. In another room the telephone was ringing impatiently, and the playwright was complaining about how unpleasant it is to live in New York. ''The city's nuts,'' he said. ''It's a society that's lost its flywheel, and it's spinning itself apart. That's my vision of New York. It's a kind of vision of hell.'' This grim imagery is the fuel that ignites Mr. Mamet's latest play ''Edmond.'' The Off Broadway production that opens Wednesday at the Provincetown Playhouse has been imported intact from the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where the play had its premiere last June. Like the production, Mr. Mamet was born in Chicago and lived there for awhile before coming to New York (by way of Vermont, where he spent several years). Much of his work is set in his home town, including ''Sexual Perversity in Chicago'' and ''American Buffalo,'' the plays that propelled him to success in the mid-70's. ''Edmond,'' however, is his first major play to take place in New York, and not by accident is it also his darkest.

SCHINDLER'S LIST By Thomas Keneally. Illustrated. 398 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $16.95. WHEN the German Army invaded Poland in 1939, a swarm of carpetbaggers trailed after it, eager for the spoils of empire. They were the black marketeers and middlemen, the young sharks who knew how to get a general drunk and leave with a contract in their pockets. Among them was a young Sudeten German named Oskar Schindler, who had a reputation for womanizing and giving lavish parties for his influential friends. Schindler knew how to make a bureaucrat happy, and he was rewarded with one of Cracow's plums. He was appointed Aryan treuhandler -read plunderer - of a prosperous Jewish-owned enamelware factory.

Law-enforcement officers were blockading a small Arizona town near the Mexican border yesterday in a confrontation with about 100 members of a faith-healing group in which two church members died. As many as nine other people, including seven deputy sheriffs, were wounded in the fight and gun battle in Miracle Valley, an unincorporated town about 60 miles southeast of Tucson, the authorities said. The officers said the church members were armed with lead pipes, clubs, tire irons and guns. The Rev. Frances Thomas, the leader of the Christ Miracle Healing Center and Church, whose members are black, insisted in a telephone interview that her followers were unarmed.

THE championship banners are nice remembrances, hanging above the court at Madison Square Garden like ribbons on a soldier's chest. So are the retired uniform numbers of yesterday's heroes, whose exploits made those championships possible. But symbolism can be overdone. The frustrations the Knicks have experienced in recent years may have resulted from living too much off memories, wrapping themselves in those flags as if they were security blankets. And a succession of confused young men had become prisoners of the past. As the Knicks prepare to open the 1982-83 season on Friday, one management goal is to cut the ties to the teams that brought New York its only two National Basketball Association titles, in 1970 and 1973. It is one thing to strive to duplicate the success that came between 1968 and 1974, but another to recreate those teams. John Gianelli could never be Willis Reed; Spencer Haywood could not become Dave DeBusschere. Ray Williams and Michael Ray Richardson could not be Walt Frazier and Earl Monroe. But they were asked to.

Some issues of The New York Times for Sunday contained an unauthorized political publication entitled ''Profiles of the Times'' that was distributed illegally to newsstands in Manhattan with instructions that it be inserted. The Times is conducting an investigation to determine the source of the fraudulent insertion. An article is on page 39.

President Reagan and the Speaker of the House, Thomas P. O'Neill Jr., exchanged accusations on the economy today as the off-year election campaign went into its final 10 days. Sounding their principal themes in a campaign that is viewed by both sides as a referendum on the Reagan Administration's economic policies, Mr. Reagan charged the Democrats with proffering ''fairy tales'' and Mr. O'Neill said the Administration had deliberately thrown people out of work. Mr. Reagan used his weekly five-minute radio broadcast to denounce what he said were ''six big myths'' put forward by the Democrats. Specifically, he denied that military spending increases and the three-year tax cut had contributed to the Federal deficit and that his Administration had cut social programs.

BEFORE anything else, it was the soil - rich, dark and fertile - that attracted people to what eventually became the state's Farm Belt. Now, after 300 years, others are coming to plow what remains of that still fecund and fruitful soil, to sow and to reap. Throughout the Farm Belt - up north in Sussex and Warren Counties, through the belly of the state in Hunterdon and Monmouth Counties and along the Delaware Valley from Burlington to Gloucester Counties - a new generation of farmers is taking advantage of the area's closeness to job markets in New York City and Philadelphia. Most of New Jersey's 9,800 farmers work their land only part time. They are following a trend of established farmers nationally by spending more of their time - usually during the winter and before spring planting - working for someone else at a temporary job.