What was going on when I was born?

Secretary of State George P. Shultz and the Soviet Ambassador, Anatoly F. Dobrynin, have met privately almost a dozen times since the beginning of the year, and top Administration officials say President Reagan is now considering whether to broaden the contacts and press to meet with Yuri V. Andropov. Officials said that although Mr. Reagan was now ready to explore areas of possible agreement, he was undecided between two strategies: seeking better relations piecemeal on individual issues or trying to negotiate an overall solution to disputes on trade, regional conflict, human rights and arms control. Reagan Limits Agenda The officials said the talks between Mr. Shultz and Ambassador Dobrynin were serious but that it would be inconsistent with that seriousness to give any details. But they also acknowledged that nothing concrete had been accomplished and that breakthroughs were not immiment. These and other officials said that so far Mr. Reagan had given Mr. Shultz the flexibility to discuss anything with Mr. Dobrynin but had limited the actual agenda to the opening of consulates in New York and Kiev, cultural exchanges, renewal of a five-year grain agreement and exploring whether it would be useful for the Secretary to visit Moscow this summer.

The Republican-controlled Senate defeated a bill that would have limited each taxpayer to a maximum of $720 in tax reduction under the 10 percent tax-rate cut that takes effect on Friday. The House had approved such a ceiling despite President Reagan's promise to veto any limit on the third year of his reduction in income tax rates. (Page A1.) Unemployment is not likely to decrease much in the near future, according to President Reagan's top economic advisers. Despite the optimism expressed by Mr. Reagan at his news conference, his advisers also believe that the rate of inflation has stopped declining and will soon begin rising slightly. (D1.)

A map in Metropolitan Report on June 22 with an article about downtown Brooklyn incorrectly depicted the boundaries for proposed housing and the extent to which the land would be developed. Housing has been recommended only for parking lots or vacant parcels in the area bounded by Boerum Place, Flatbush Avenue, Atlantic Avenue and Livingston Street.

A picture caption yesterday with an article about purloined Carter campaign documents misidentified the source of the book shown. It was made available to the White House this week by Patrick H. Caddell, a Carter aide.

and the 150 or so characters they portrayed - stood in the garden behind Miss Simms, talking to planters and trees, feathers and fences. One told a blade of grass the myth of Persephone and Demeter, while another rendered a Haitian folk tale to a large rock. This apparently bizarre tableau was nothing beyond the ordinary for those who came here recently to learn from Laura Simms how to tell a story. The 12 students paid $450 to sequester themselves with Miss Simms - a professional storyteller who has spun her tales at Town Hall and the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan - and such guest instructors as an ethnomusicologist, a professor of Jungian psychology and a business agent. They sang and danced and exercised and emoted something in the manner of Method actors, all of toward the end of mastering one story by week's end.

Sales of new single-family houses climbed by 4.3 percent in May, reaching their highest level in nearly three years, the Government reported today. Prices rose to a record median of $75,900 and an average of $90,700, a level that one economist said ''puts a double whammy'' on potential home buyers already facing higher mortgage rates. Robert Dederick, Under Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs, said continued sales gains in new and existing houses ''attests to strong underlying demand for housing.'' Therefore, he said, a moderate rise in mortgage rates in the past several weeks ''should not be viewed as a major threat to the home-building recovery.''

The Supreme Court ruled today that a state tax deduction for education expenses is constitutional even though parochial schools reap most of the benefits. Supporters of the Reagan Administration's proposal to provide Federal income tax credits for private school tuition, now before Congress, said the ruling helped their cause but acknowledged that it left some key questions unresolved. In a narrowly worded 5-to-4 decision, the Court upheld a Minnesota law that permits any parent who incurs tuition or various other expenses at any elementary or secondary school, private or public, to take a state income tax deduction. Rehnquist Sees No Establishment Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist, writing for the majority, said the tax aid was not an unconstitutional ''establishment'' of religion even though nearly all the tax benefits went to parents with children in parochial schools. More than 95 percent of Minnesota's 91,000 private school students attend religious schools, and few of the 820,000 public school students incur deductible expenses.

Pakistan and adjoining areas of Afghanistan have surpassed Southeast Asia as the biggest supplier of heroin to the United States and the rest of the world, according to authorities here and in Washington. In the last six to nine months the region has become the source of as much as 85 to 90 percent of all heroin sold in New York City, the officials say. So extensive is the output of the drug in Pakistan, both Pakistani and American authorities say, that more than two metric tons of pure heroin - enough to supply half the addicts in the United States for a year, and worth up to $500 million wholesale if sold there - has been seized by law enforcement agencies in this country in the last 18 months. But the officials say that perhaps two to three times that much, produced by Pathan tribesmen in crude laboratories hidden away in mountainous areas on both the Pakistani and Afghan sides of the Khyber Pass, is successfully smuggled out of the country by a growing and increasingly skillful network of Pakistani traffickers.

The Securities and Exchange Commission charged yesterday that the G. Heileman Brewing Company illegally acted on inside information last year in acquiring stock in the Olympia Brewing Company. That action earned Heileman nearly $1 million, the commission said. According to the S.E.C., Heileman knew before investing in Olympia that Olympia was about to be the target of a takeover by the Pabst Brewing Company, which eventually acquired Olympia. Heileman acquired some of Pabst's breweries.

The Carter Administration documents that found their way to President Reagan's 1980 campaign staff have raised a flurry of questions about what is standard practice and what is unethical behavior in Presidential races. The White House maintains that even if the documents were ''pilfered,'' in the word of David A. Stockman, director of the Office of Management and Budget, the unauthorized transfer of inside information from one campaign to another is routine. But aides to former President Carter assert that the incident is highly unusual and that the acquisition of debate preparation material by the Reagan campaign raises the question of how much additional material might have flowed out. National Security Issue ''This clearly is not just a secretary, on the spur of the moment, grabbing a document, making a copy of it and sending it to the opposition,'' said a Carter Administration official who asked not to be identified. ''I'm nervous about speculating on who did it, but you wonder if someone in the national security area wasn't trying to affect the political process.''

A little over a year ago, John Sweet got stomach cancer. After his surgery, he developed a narrowing of the esophagus, and his weight dwindled from 176 pounds to 110. To prevent him from starving, doctors in early May implanted a catheter in a vein near his heart so he could be fed intravenously. But the 27-year-old Mr. Sweet didn't like being in the hospital. So he signed up with Home Health Care of America, a company that likens itself to a ''hospital without walls.'' It set him up with an intravenous, or IV, pump at home and taught him how to use it. He hooks himself on before he goes to bed, then unhooks himself in the morning. He's already put on 20 pounds and he's back at his job as service manager at Acme Datsun in Highland Park, N.J. ''I've even got back into racing motorcycles,'' he says. ''Before, I used to just lie around. I can't say anything but good about this.''

Despite President Reagan's assurance last night that ''America's economy is beginning to sparkle,'' his top economic advisers see little hope for much improvement in the nation's high unemployment anytime soon. They also believe that the rate of inflation has stopped declining and will soon begin rising slightly. The Administration published today its newly revised economic forecast for this year and next. It projected a national unemployment rate of an average of 9.6 percent during the last three months of the year, down just one-tenth of a percentage point from the figure forecast in April. The jobless rate stood at 10 percent in May.