What was going on when I was born?

MOZART was the quintessential wonder child. Before he was out of the 18th-century equivalent of rompers, he had been taken by his father, Leopold, through England and most of Europe, where he was feted in the capitals and courts for his virtuosity, his uncanny ability to sight-read and improvise and - to a lesser extent - for his compositions. Superficially, Mozart was outrightly exploited: He got the applause, his father got the money. More important for posterity, however, he was exposed to all the important musical influences of his time -new ideas about form, the developing knowledge of instrumentation and the extension of the possibilities of melody and harmony - which he absorbed and filtered through his incredibly perceptive mind. They emerged with the unmistakable stamp of his genius.

EARLY in March, James F. Gillespie, who has lived in Westport, C onn., for 20 years, dashed off an irate letter to the local n ewspaper. He was furious, he said, because town zoning regulations p ermit psychiatrists to operate out of their homes but do not offer t he same privilege to psychologists like himself. Why should he be d enied equal economic opportunity?, he asked. With his three children now grown and gone, his five-bedroom contemporary-style house was ideal for a professional office, he said. Moreover, it offered him a reprieve from the $800 a month he now paid for commercial space. Across town, Martha Stewart, the food writer, also was angry. Her home-based catering business had also run afoul of the local zoning regulations. ''They are archaic,'' she said. ''I can have four servants come to my house each day. But if I have two people come in to help me with my new book I am considered in violation and causing a traffic nuisance.'' She has been considering filing a lawsuit against the town. The town plans to undertake a special review of its home-occupation regulations.

Prospective buyers who visit the Cape Cod-styled model house at U.S. Home Corporation's Beckett, N.J., development, should be as concerned about the area's soil conditions and rainfall as they are about local schools and mortgage rates. The homes planned for this unusual housing development will not be on standard lots but will sit on 98 minifarms ranging in size from 1.6 to 18 acres.

EACH spring the blooming forsythia signals the return, not only of the shad but also of the shad fishermen, to the Hudson River. It is a springtime event dating to the Indians.

Secretary of State George P. Shultz said today that he was prepared to go to Damascus to discuss a Syrian troop withdrawal from Lebanon. He said he would interrupt his diplomatic shuttle between Jerusalem and Beirut to make the trip as soon as he was satisfied that there was ''genuine progress'' toward an agreement on an Israeli pullout. Mr. Shultz has been in the Middle East since last Sunday trying to work out an agreement between Lebanon and Israel on an Israeli withdrawal. He has said the talks are ''inching forward.'' 22-Page Document Is Reviewed To step up the pace of the Lebanese-Israeli talks, he worked late into the evening with Lebanese leaders to review in detail an agreement and annex, 22 pages in all, that the two countries have been unable to conclude in the last four months.

George Balanchine, one of the greatest choreographers in the history of ballet and the co-founder and artistic director of the New York City Ballet, died yesterday. Mr. Balanchine, who was 79 years old, died at Roosevelt Hospital of pneumonia, a complication that arose from a progressive neurological disorder. In guiding the New York City Ballet to international pre-eminence, Mr. Balanchine established one of the foremost artistic enterprises the United States has called its own. As a 20th-century master, his personal contribution loomed even larger. More than anyone else, he elevated choreography in ballet to an independent art. The plotless ballet became a synonym for Balanchine ballet. In an age when ballet had been dependent on a synthesis of spectacle, storytelling, decor, mime, acting and music, and only partly on dancing, George Balanchine insisted that the dance element come first.

NEW HAVEN WHILE the nation last week read of a report by a Federal commission that strongly criticized the quality of American education, the newly named State Education Commissioner pledged that Connecticut schools with poor student performances and high drop-out rates will now get priority for state attention and assistance. ''The time is upon us when the state has to give very careful attention to the needs of urban schools,'' said the new Commissioner, Gerald N. Tirozzi, who was appointed by a unanimous vote of the State Board of Education on Monday. Dr. Tirozzi, currently New Haven Superintendent of Schools, observed that he enters the job when high technology in industry is demanding improved skills in graduates, the image of public education is poor, teachers are leaving their profession for higher-paying jobs, principals are disciplinarians instead of instructional advisers and the state is ranking near the bottom in the country in financing of its public schools. ''In the next couple of years, education is going to have to come to the forefront,'' insisted Dr. Tirozzi in an interview in his New Haven office. He will not begin his new job on a full-time basis until July 1, so he can finish the school year in New Haven. He replaces Mark R. Shedd, who resigned as Commissioner in January.

ELENI, By Nicholas Gage. 470 pp. New York: Random House. $15.95. ONE of the satisfactions of Nicholas Gage's ''Eleni'' is the grafting of an ancient theme on a contemporary situation. It is like watching the ''Oresteia'' in modern dress, with an up-to-date Orestes, now an investigative reporter with a tape recorder. It takes you back to times before the printed word, when audiences went to the theater for a cleansing experience. Through the personal tragedy of his mother's death by a Communist firing squad in the Greek civil war, Mr. Gage addresses the essential character of modern war, in which the distinction between combatant and noncombatant has been lost. In World War II, when civilians were slaughtered in enormous numbers as a matter of state policy, that horror was given a name and remembered. The notion of the war criminal came into being, and some of these men were made to answer for their actions. In many other cases, however, in which the killings were on a small scale, and random rather than systematic, the crimes were forgotten, larger horrors somehow making lesser ones seem more acceptable.

A Pesticide suspected of causing cancer in humans, and believed to be harmful to birds and other wildlife, has been approved for use on 4,375 acres in Burlington and Ocean Counties as part of the state's program for controlling gypsy moths. The overall program, approved and supervised by the state's Department of Agriculture, is tentatively scheduled to begin in about two weeks. The pesticide is trichlorfon, also known by one of its trade names, Dylox. Like its predecessor, Sevin, it is classified as a broadspectrum pesticide, one that kills not only the species for which it is intended, but also other insects and animals.

Anthony J. Alvarado, the next Schools Chancellor, said yesterday that he intended to make sweeping changes in the way the school system is run -changes that he said would cost some officials their jobs and put a stronger emphasis on students and teachers. ''There is always the question, can the octopus so enmesh you that there will always be an arm around you, tugging you from the direction you want to go,'' Mr. Alvarado, a 40-year-old district superintendent in East Harlem, said in an interview. ''The octopus is the system, the bureacuracy. I'll walk around with a pair of shears in my back pocket. Whenever I see a tentacle, I'll take it out.''

Anthony J. Alvarado preaches an educational philosophy based on the ''expectation of success,'' but he doesn't always practice it. A month ago, he did not believe he had the slightest chance to become New York City's next Schools Chancellor. Two weeks ago, he was congratulating Deputy Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. on getting the $85,000-a-year post. But last week, following Mr. Wagner's surprise rejection by the State Education Commissioner and several tumultuous meetings of the Board of Education, Mr. Alvarado found himself succeeding Frank J. Macchiarola as head of the nation's largest school system.

THE WITNESS OF POETRY, By Czeslaw Milosz. 121 pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. $8.95. A DISTINGUISHED Polish poet who survived the Nazi occupation of his country, then served its Communist regime as a diplomat just long enough to write a classic report on its inflictions, ''The Captive Mind,'' gets up at Harvard to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on poetry. ''Poetry'' suddenly takes on a Slavic vehemence and political importunity that are unfamiliar to American poets and critics of poetry and would have alarmed genteel Charles Eliot Norton. Czeslaw Milosz won the Nobel Prize in 1980. He admits in the published version of the Norton lectures that, as a poet, ''All my life I have been in the power of a daimonion, and how the poems dictated by him came into being I do not quite understand. That is the reason why, in my years of teaching Slavic literatures, I have limited myself to the history of literature, trying to avoid poetics.'' So much for the many pedagogue-critics who, without writing poetry, easily explain to their equally innocent students ''what makes poetry work.''