What was going on when I was born?

HER story reads like a page from Greek mythology and might have beene ntitled, ''Julie's Odyssey.'' Julie Moss, after all, was swift, as w as the goddess Atalanta, who was so fleet and proud that she vowed n ever to marry any man unless he was capable of defeating her in a f ootrace. Miss Moss did not enter the Bud-Light Ironman Championship Triathlon in Hawaii on Feb. 6, 1982 with any expectation of outdistancing all the men, but she knew that if she performed to her potential, she could finish first among the women and leave more than one man in her wake. The Ironman Triathlon is a grueling test of endurance that would tax even a modern-day Pheidippides. The three-stage race begins with a 2.4-mile ocean swim, followed by a 112-mile spin on a bicycle and last, those 26.2 miles on foot. The only breaks are for a change of clothing and perhaps a brief shower after each event.

The celebration over sending the first American woman into orbit has tended to overshadow the fact that Dr. Sally K. Ride is to be the first person to perform one of the most significant tasks of the space age. Reaching into the void with a 50-foot robotic arm, she plans to capture a satellite as it hurtles about the earth and, using mechanical might conferred by gears and motors, bring it safely to rest in the cargo bay of the space shuttle. Her aerial exercise points to the not-so-distant future when it could be routine to grasp satellites, mine asteroids, build space stations - in short, to clutch and shape instead of just to pass through space as an awestruck visitor. It marks a new stage in the taming of the high frontier.

WHEN wind drifts in from the southwest on a summer's day, Connecticut residents, especially those in New Haven and Fairfield Counties, often experience stinging in their eyes, burning in their throats and some have trouble breathing, say state environmental officials. Exactly where that polluted air comes from, how much of it flows across Connecticut's borders and precisely what pollutants it contains are the basis of an ongoing dispute between state and Federal environmental officials. New York, New Jersey and some Middle Western states permit industries within their borders to burn fuel with a sulfur level higher than Connecticut allows. Sulfur is a major pollutant. Connecticut officials contend that dirty air from states with more lenient pollution laws eventually drifts into Connecticut. For years the state has been trying to get the Federal Government and those states to cut those sulfur levels.

We live in a time of penance, operatically speaking, but let's try to see the bright side. Although the age of masterpieces may be past, like the age of miracles, the scarcity, at the moment, of stirring new works has provided us with breathing space, with more than enough time to go sifting through the detritus of the past for buried wonders. Generally, of course, such digging leaves the musical archeologist with little more than dust in his hands. Every excavator into dark and dusty regions of the repertory comes to understand that most neglected works have been neglected for good reasons, not always because our ancestors had tin ears or armor-plated souls. But immense shifts in style and taste do take place. Many operagoers now understand and enjoy the better works of the opera seria style, such as ''Idomeneo,'' which only a few years ago was tolerated only by the hard-core Mozart lover. Monteverdi and Handel have been reassessed. Berlioz has a foot in the door at the Metropolitan Opera and so does Poulenc. The late operas of Strauss turn up and, of course, so do formerly obscure operas of Verdi, Rossini, Donizetti and Bellini. And the sifting goes on.

In the eyes of many children Fred Rogers, the man who has been entering the nation's living rooms for two decades on ''Mister Rogers's Neighborhood,'' is America's nurturing, surrogate dad. And, of late, an increasingly busy dad. This Father's Day weekend marks the debut of Mr. Rogers's comic opera for children ''All in the Laundry'' at the Opera Shop of the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan. His first book for grownups, ''Mister Rogers Talks With Parents,'' has been in bookstores since the beginning of the month, and this week he'll be taping his next prime-time television special for parents, about day care, which will be broadcast in the fall. And last week he began work on a new batch of episodes for his half-hour series, which will help children to deal with conflict and aggression. Yet, despite all of this energetic activity, the appeal of Fred Rogers continues to derive from that singular melding of directness, gentleness and vulnerability which first made him a television phenomenon. And, as he extends his presence beyond the borders of ''The Neighborhood,'' as he calls it, he is finding it easier to relax a bit more about the condition of being Fred Rogers. ''I've grown,'' the 55-year-old Mr. Rogers says simply of his new equanimity in his 29th year of children's television.

For years, skiers and recreation seekers have flocked to the area around Great Gorge in the heart of New Jersey's Vernon Valley for day trips. Now, with expectations that visitors will want to spend more than a day, two condominium projects are being developed in the area.

''These are not wonderful, dusty halls, gloomy, redolent of the Valley of the Kings,'' said Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ''But I don't think you can make an installation today by trying to recreate that British Museum habitat. This is the new world. This is America.'' This Wednesday, the Metropolitan's entire collection of the art and artifacts of ancient Egypt goes on public display for the first time. It took nine years and three stages, but every one of the collection's estimated 40,000 objects, from the tiniest beads and tools to the colossal statuary of sphinxes, goddesses and kings, has now been examined, cleaned and chronologically installed in 32 scrubbed, polished and fully modernized galleries named after their donor Lila Acheson Wallace, The museum within a museum presents a continuous and detailed picture of a civilization that remained remarkably intact over 30 dynasties and close to 3000 years. ''Outside of Cairo, this is the vastest and most comprehensive display of Egyptian art in the world,'' Mr. de Montebello said. ''The Boston Museum of Fine Arts has better Old Kingdom material. Both the Louvre and the British Museum have more statuary of the monumental kind, but I don't think there is any place else with 1.6 acres of such beautifully displayed materials and a combination of primary galleries and study galleries, where you can see the daily life of ancient Egypt coming alive.''

Four men and a woman, the first American woman to go into space, rocketed into orbit today aboard the space shuttle Challenger and then launched the first of two satellites in the successful beginning of a busy six-day mission. The winged spaceship lifted off on schedule at 7:33 A.M. after one of the smoothest countdowns of the shuttle program. It carried two communications satellites, an assortment of scientific experiments and a West German satellite that is to be released and then retrieved in a critical test of the shuttle's 50-foot mechanical arm. On future missions astronauts expect to release small satellites with the mechanical arm and to rendezvous with ailing satellites to retrieve them for repairs in orbit or back on the earth.

HARTFORD THE shiny new signs had only been posted for a few days beside the Interstate highways entering Connecticut. ''Tandem Trailers Prohibited in Connecticut,'' they read. Last Monday afternoon, crews from the State Department of Transportation made the rounds and covered each sign with a sheet of plastic. Connecticut had lost the first major battle in its fight with the Federal Government to keep out the double-trailer trucks. Whether the state could win the war remained in doubt.

THE Shoreham nuclear power plant, now scheduled for completion at a sum of $3.2 billion, is so expensive that Long Island would suffer serious economic consequences if its cost were passed along to consumers under the conventional rate-making method, according to consumer advocates and the Public Service Commission. Even the Long Island Lighting Company, the project's builder, acknowledges that special steps will have to be taken to phase in its cost, which will raise rates by about 50 percent. The development of a formula to phase in these costs will be the first such action for a utility construction project in New York State, and possibly in the nation. And it will represent a new milestone for the Lilco reactor, which has already set records for construction delays and expenditures.

WITH the incessant rains of the past few months has come a f irsttime experience for thousands of suburban homeowners in the New Y ork metropolitan area - basement flooding. ''Almost everyone seems to have a problem with soggy conditions this spring,'' said Bruce Whyte, a hydrologist with the Northeast River Forecast Center in Bloomfield, Conn., a Federal agency that monitors inland water levels. The problem has not been confined to structures on low-lying lands or near the water. Officials and tradespeople are receiving reports of water seeping into the basements of houses on normally high and dry ground.

TRENTON ANEW proposal to solve a problem that has vexed thousands of coastal homeowners since the state claimed their land more than a year ago will be the subject of a hearing to be held this month. New Jersey owns former tidal, or riparian, land until an individual or company buys a riparian grant to it from the state. In the past, thousands of acres of this land were filled in and developed illegally without acquiring a grant from the state. In resales over the years, thousands of buyers bought homes, not realizing, until New Jersey staked claims last year, that their titles were clouded.