What was going on when I was born?

The Senate voted today to confirm Edwin Meese 3d as Attorney General, more than a year after he was first nominated by President Reagan. The 63 to 31 vote came after five days of filibustering by Farm Belt senators who had delayed action on Mr. Meese's nomination in an attempt to extract pledges from the Administration of emergency credit relief for the nation's farmers. All those voting against Mr. Meese's confirmation were Democrats. A smiling Mr. Meese, flanked by his wife, Ursula, and their daughter, Dana, met with reporters on the White House lawn immediately after the confirmation vote. ''I'm not bitter at all,'' he said. ''I think a number of people had questions. We answered those questions. Right now I'm just glad it's over.''

A battle- weary Senate finally resolved one acrimonious dispute today over farm credit measures, but the lawmakers set the stage for another skirmish over the same issue next week. The agreement reached today ended a week-long filibuster against the confirmation of Edwin Meese 3d, who was then approved as Attorney General by a vote of 63 to 31. The farm credit compromise, approved by the Senate leadership, provides that members from both parties can offer proposals for additional aid to hard-pressed farmers who are seeking financing to start spring planting. The proposals, four from each party, would be offered as amendments to an African famine relief bill that is scheduled for floor action on Monday. Reagan Talk on Farm Issue President Reagan, who previously criticized the linking of the credit proposals to the Meese vote, said today in his weekly radio broadcast that only a minority of farmers were in severe financial distress and that the taxpayers must not be asked to save every farmer. (Page 26.)

SOME years ago the poet David Antin stopped writing poems and began talking. He would go into a public space, turn on his tape recorder and to all appearances talk off the top of his head. Mr. Antin has an interesting and capacious mind, and his talking was pretty lively. These ''talk pieces,'' as he calls them, belong somewhere among a standup comedian's rap, a storyteller's fable and a formal lecture. Mr. Antin's manner is relaxed and the progress of his talk seemingly random. I say ''seemingly'' because his casual manner belies a more serious intent. That intent has something to do with the nature of audience expectations - the way we expect a poet to read his poems, a lecturer to follow a reasoned argument, a performance artist to ''do'' something. Mr. Antin defeats all these expectations and provides something else, and as anyone who has witnessed one of his talks can testify, the experience can be stimulating in all sorts of ways that poetry readings, lectures and performances seldom are.

IN the last seven years, Edith and Henry W. Engel of Larchmont have seen their two grandchildren twice. In 1981, they caught a brief glimpse of them in a courtroom. Another time, the couple watched unobserved from a parked car as the children walked home from school. The Engels lost contact with their grandchildren in 1978, shortly after their daughter and the children's father were divorced. The father, who has custody, refuses to allow their visits.

In the final minutes, the ball always seems to wind up in Otis Birdsong's hands, even when he would prefer not to have it. Birdsong said he was battling a case of the flu tonight, that his head had been stuffy for three days and that he really wanted to crawl between the bedsheets and fall asleep. Instead, he made two key jump shots in the final 2 minutes as the Nets slipped past the Detroit Pistons, 111- 103, before a crowd of 20,276 at the Silverdome. ''For three days,'' Birdsong said afterward, ''I've felt like I was in a fog. Right now, I just want to go to bed.''

An early Easter always spells trouble for the apparel industry, because it shortens the spring selling season. But the fact that Easter Sunday this year, April 7, comes two weeks earlier than in 1984 is only one reason apparel makers, importers and retailers are in deep trouble.

A little more than a year ago, Holiday Inns announced the creation of a no-frills chain of franchised hotels to be known as Hampton Inns. With four hotels in the new chain already in operation and 75 more on the drawing board, the company recently approved the first in the line to be built in Connecticut.

WHEN Mitsuko Anzai was 25 years old and still answering telephones and booking tickets for her travel agency employer, she took a step that astounded her colleagues: She asked for a promotion. ''My supervisor just stared at me with his mouth open,'' Miss Anzai said, smiling at the memory of 28 years ago. ''He said he thought it would be too much for a woman to handle, and had never dreamed of giving me a responsible job. But he said he recognized my good work and would give me something when it opened up.'' Six months later Miss Anzai found herself in charge of a team of eight people. Now, at 53, she is the highest-ranking woman in the Japan Travel Bureau, Japan's largest travel agency, running a 68- person office with annual sales of $92 million - the third most profitable branch in the company.

When a company outgrows its offices and there is no vacant space in the building into which it can expand, the conventional solution is to pack up and move on. But an unusual leasing arrangment will allow Tri- Star Pictures, a Manhattan-based film company that now occupies the 12th floor of 711 Fifth Avenue, to push through into space on the 12th floor of the building next door, 717 Fifth Avenue.

Gen. William C. Westmoreland's decision to settle his libel suit against CBS last week was prompted, according to his friends, by his demoralization over damaging testimony by his former aides and his feeling that, however right he was, he was in a ''no-win situation.'' The general knew from pretrial depositions how witnesses were likely to testify. Nevertheless, his friends said, he was so shaken by the willingness of his former intelligence chief in Vietnam to ''break the old West Point tie'' and take the stand against him that he was open to a proposed agreement that bore a close resemblance to an offer made by CBS a year ago. Drafts Compared Of the two significant differences between the documents, one was favorable to General Westmoreland, the other to CBS. The proposal in 1984, nine months before the trial, said General Westmoreland ''believes that the broadcast was prejudicial in concept and execution.'' The agreement reached last week does not. The 1984 proposal also said CBS News ''stands by the accuracy and fairness of its broadcast.'' In the final agreement, this language was reserved for a separate statement by CBS.

Lower Fifth Avenue below 14th Street and the side streets leading off it have long been a mixed domain of residential and commercial uses. But the demand for housing in that part of Manhattan is especially strong and now developers are converting commercial space there into residences.

Have the makers of the film ''1984'' succeeded in transposing into cinematic form the startling originality of one of the 20th century's most famous novels? For those who have not read George Orwell's classic book, the story we see on the screen is, frankly, meager. If all we knew of Orwell was this movie, he would be considered a futuristic writer of pessimistic temperament and mediocre talent. Orwell's mordant verbal evocation of the horrors to come is simply not translated into visual terms. The book's skeleton is there. Winston Smith (John Hurt), the movie's protagonist, lives a squalid life in a grimy, greenish-gray, unrecognizable London of the future. (When the novel was published, in 1949, the year of the title was still 35 years away). Faucets drip, elevators don't work, windows are broken. There is a shortage of razor blades. Smith himself is scrawny, sallow- skinned, dressed in an ill-fitting jumpsuit of Peking blue. He has a wretched little apartment in a block where discolored paint peels off the walls and corridors are filled with litter.