What was going on when I was born?

AT dawn on a Saturday, Wayne Fox, a Manhattan investment banker, floats silently over the hillocks, farms and rivers of southern New Jersey in a hot-air balloon. A few hours later, Maurice Matiz, a computer consultant, rises and goes to practice his Frisbee throw, preparing for his next nationwide tour with Kaboom!, a team of amateurs whose game is known as ultimate Frisbee. And if weather permits, Patrick McGarrigle, a Columbia University junior, puts on white slacks and a blue blazer, and, mallet in hand, meets friends to perfect his game of croquet. ''We are just people who want to party and have fun and be pompous for a couple of hours,'' the 19-year-old Mr. McGarrigle explains. The three New Yorkers are among the tens of thousands of people who put aside their usual chores each week to take part in what outsiders may consider offbeat sports - a wide variety of organized activities in the metropolitan area that have small but devoted followings.

ON Feb. 1 the Food and Drug Administration put off a decision to ban six artificial colors that have been found to cause cancer in test animals. To those who have been following this proposed regulation, the delay could hardly have been a surprise: It was the 26th time that the agency had postponed action since the proposal was first made, in 1960. While 26 postponements in 25 years may be a record, there are a number of other proposed regulations for food, drug and cosmetic additives that have settled into a similar limbo. Here are some examples: * A decision to ban saccharin has been overridden by Congress periodically since 1977; * A decision to ban sulfites has been pending at the F.D.A. since 1982; * A ban on antibiotics in animal feed was first proposed in 1977 and action on it is still pending. At the end of 1984 there were 120 F.D.A. proposals dealing with food additives on which action was still pending. Some of them go back to 1973.

The Going Out Guide on Saturday misidentified the Franz Werfel play being presented by the Jean Cocteau Repertory at the Bouwerie Lane Theater. It is ''Goat Song.''

An article in the Business People column yesterday about the Pabst Brewing Company misidentified William F. Smith Jr. He is president and chief executive officer.

Carl C. Icahn, the New York financier, yesterday revised his $8.1 billion takeover bid for the Phillips Petroleum Company for the third time. But Wall Street traders seemed unimpressed because of the large number of conditions he placed on the latest offer. Mr. Icahn, who already owns 7.5 million shares, offered to pay $60 a share for 70 million shares, enough to give him slightly more than half the stock. If he succeeded, he said, he would swap $50 worth of securities for each remaining share.

A new party of anti-Government politicians picked up surprisingly strong support and emerged today from general elections as South Korea's leading opposition group. The ruling Democratic Justice Party, as expected, retained its majority in the National Assembly. But potentially the most significant result of Tuesday's legislative elections was the success of the New Korea Democratic Party, formed by opposition figures who only three months ago were banned from political life by President Chun Doo Hwan. The new party's strong showing created a possibility that the fundamentally weak legislature could become a more vigorous political forum.

To many in New England, the Bank of Boston Corporation is a monolithic, powerful financial institution that helps form the bedrock of the region's economy and that they feel they know well. But the bank does occasionally show a face that few recognize. This happened most recently with the guilty plea last week by the principal unit of the Bank of Boston, the First National Bank of Boston, to Federal charges that it had committed a felony by not reporting $1.22 billion in cash transfers between the United States and Europe, incurring a record $500,000 fine. John M. Walker Jr., the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Enforcement and Operations, has said that the cash movements resembled a money-laundering operation.

FOR the Chinese, the New Year is a time of intricate and special family observances, most of which revolve around the symbolic nature of food and the sense of taste. This Year of the Ox, 4683, which begins next Wednesday, is no exception. Fresh clams offer the tastes of good fortune. Chicken becomes a stand-in for that symbol of renewal and rebirth, the phoenix. A fish indicates plenty. Eggs represent silver ingots and mushrooms opportunities; apples are symbols of peace. Steamed ''good luck'' dumplings are deliberately shaped like the ancient golden coins called taels. The greenness of broccoli is youth, and the New Year's cake made of rice, sugar, yeast and water symbolizes the hope that each year our fortunes, like the cake, will rise higher and higher. Sweetness is what I associate most vividly with the occasion as it was celebrated during my childhood in China - the taste of lotus seeds coated with cane sugar, the candied winter melon, the glutinous rice sweet with melted cane sugar, the stalks of fresh sugar cane my brother and I would chew.

''You on the cutting edge of technology have already made yesterday's impossibilities the commonplace realities of today.

When 83 families put money down in 1982 to buy new red-brick row houses in the South Bronx, they joined the first urban pioneers in a New York City effort to turn the devastated blocks of the Bronx back into neighborhoods. But more than two years later, the only completed houses are the two models that were built to entice those buyers. No substantial work has been done on the 81 others since last September, and the houses nearest completion have been boarded up. The developer of the project, on East 169th Street near McKinley Square in the Morrisania section, says he has exhausted his $3.3 million construction loan and needs $4 million more to finish the project. The lender, Chemical Bank, is auditing the project before deciding whether to lend more money. In the meantime, the developer, at the bank's insistence, has hired an independent construction manager to run the project.

The United States and the Soviet Union will hold talks on Middle East issues next Tuesday in Vienna, State Department officials said today. Richard W. Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, will head the American delegation. Vladimir P. Polyakov, his counterpart in the Soviet Foreign Ministry, will head the Soviet side, the officials said. The idea for discussing the Middle East in detail was originally accepted in principle after President Reagan proposed it to Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko when they met here last fall. It was discussed briefly by Secretary of State George P. Shultz and Mr. Gromyko in Geneva last month.

A picture caption in Metropolitan Report yesterday with an article on milk prices in New York City misidentified the person shown at Farmland Dairies in Wallington, N.J. She was Lina Kavolius, a quality control supervisor.