What was going on when I was born?

WESTFIELD RUSSELL ARNONE, owner of the International Wines and Liquors store in this affluent Union County community, could not figure out how his competitor down the street could undersell him on many brands, especially since state law requires liquor wholesalers to sell at the same price to all retailers. The competitor, Shoppers Liquor Mart, a newer, larger store, was ''selling things at cost,'' Mr. Arnone said. Then, one day in October 1983, a sales representative from a liquor wholesaler walked in and offered him a ''special deal'' - a bribe - and, Mr. Arnone said, everything became clear. According to Mr. Arnone, the sales representative, a woman, said, ''I got your letter and I'm here to see you.'' ''She got off the parkway,'' he said, ''and she turned left instead of right. She was in the wrong place.'' (Mr. Arnone's store is opposite the NJ Transit railroad station.)

DRIVING eastbound into Columbia on Route 66 the wooded land is seen dotted with a row of ''For Sale'' signs. When the woods end, a string of newly built houses sit across the road from a farm. ''You drive down a road that was completely empty a year ago, and now it has six houses already sold and occupied,'' said Karen Grava Williams, a member of the Town Board of Finance. And while other towns in the state are closing schools, Columbia is contemplating an addition to its elementary school. Columbia, a Tolland County town of 3,500 people about 20 miles from Hartford, is starting to see the growth that has been changing rural communities across the country and affecting their schools, taxes and quality of life.

MEN AND ANGELS By Mary Gordon. 239 pp. New York: Random House. $16.95. THE title and the second epigraph of Mary Gordon's third novel, ''Men and Angels,'' are taken, characteristically, from the Bible, from the familiar passage in I Corinthians: ''Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.'' And in this novel Miss Gordon returns once more to a problem that dominated much of ''Final Payments,'' the problem of loving the unlovely. In ''Final Payments'' the narrator, Isabel, who has for many years cared with apparently selfless devotion for her paralyzed father, finds herself on his death confronted with the nature of her own long-suppressed sexuality, and toward the end of the book, shocked by that sexuality's voracious, amoral demands, she retreats into masochistic atonement. She gives up her married lover and goes to live with and care for the woman she most dislikes in the world, her father's former housekeeper, a plain, stupid, mean-spirited and selfish creature whose demands fortunately prove so grotesque that Isabel is finally able to break away.

THERE is an undeniable charm to the look of old houses on old streets. The desire to preserve that charm, for its own sake and for its market value, leads many property owners to seek historic designation for their houses and neighborhoods. Many also are motivated by the Federal tax credits offered for the rehabilitation of designated properties. The designation process does not have to be initiated by officials. It can be started by residents of a city or a suburban neighborhood hoping to form a district, or, in some towns, by owners for their own houses. In Rye, N.Y., for example, a couple have just acquired designation for their 1830 sea captain's house to protect it from an impending bridge project.

BECAUSE euphemism, which is an effort to make something sound specially nice, implies that unless prettified it will be specially unacceptable, a euphemistic formation can easily turn into its opposite. That would be a ''dysphemism,'' a coinage almost as ugly as what it describes. Easy and obvious examples are found in the troubled area of racial names. For many years, ''Afro-Americans,'' ''the colored'' and ''Negroes'' were prevalent as efforts, more or less highfalutin, to say what it is now accepted procedure to express by the word ''black.'' The latest word is notably inexact, since most of the people it designates are different shades of brown, sometimes very light. (It is, to be sure, no more inexact than the word ''white'' applied to a spectrum of faces from pinko-gray to swarthy.) But it is a ''genuine'' word, implying in its very overstatement rejection of all efforts to mitigate or evade the basic facts; it is, in addition, not the word of outsiders.

Several years ago, Abbott Laboratories, one of the nation's leading hospital suppliers, landed a large contract to sell intravenous pumps to a medical group in Texas. ''They said the reason we won the contract was that we had the highest-priced product,'' said Charles J. Aschauer, an executive vice president at Abbott. Concerned that health-care costs were skyrocketing to unsustainable levels, Mr. Aschauer remembers how uneasy he felt about the stated reason for his company's victory. ''When you saw that happen, you knew something had to give someday,'' he said. And indeed it did - with a vengeance. The nation's health-care industry is now being rocked by a revolution, begun in late 1983, that is drastically changing the way Americans are being treated for everything from cataracts to hardening of the arteries. And nowhere is the economic fallout more visible than in the hospital-supply business, which is groping for ways to dig itself out from one of its worst years on record.

Thousands of people exposed to the poison gas that leaked from the Union Carbide pesticide factory here in December are suffering from incurable problems with breathing, sleeping, digesting food and performing even light physical labor, doctors say. Government health officials say 5,000 to 10,000 people will probably never be able to earn a living because of their injuries. But problems in counting the injured and keeping treatment records on them have led to angry assertions by independent health groups that there could be as many as 50,000 people seriously injured. Moreover, confusion, inefficiency and haphazard record-keeping are plaguing the medical relief system created here for the victims, health experts said in interviews. Precise Figures Not Likely These experts said there was random or casual prescribing of painkillers, sedatives, antacid tablets and many other drugs; some of the drugs are potentially harmful, they added.

President Reagan has sent two senior officials to Japan to try to win trade concessions before Japan reorganizes its telecommunications industry, the White House said today. The reorganization, to take effect Monday, may limit foreigners' access to the Japanese market for communications equipment, American officials and business executives fear. The Cabinet will meet early next week to discuss the talks; if they have been fruitless, top officials are expected to consider supporting legislation providing for trade reprisals against Japan. The two officials, Lionel H. Olmer, Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade Administration, and Dr. Gaston Sigur, a Japan specialist on the National Security Council, went to Tokyo Friday night.

LEXINGTON, Ky. LOU CARNESECCA got the point. As he said later, ''You don't have to be a Phi Beta Kappa.'' With two minutes left in the game, he turned to his assistants and he wrapped up the season in a phrase: ''It's really a great team.''

The Administration has proposed a sharp reduction in the Government's efforts to gather and distribute statistics about all aspects of American life. Under the proposal, contained in a directive drafted by the the Office of Management and Budget, the budget office would have authority over all information-gathering efforts by Federal agencies. The agencies would have to to show that the data were essential to their mission, that they were not likely to be gathered by the private sector and that their benefits outweighed the collection costs. The directive would apply to labor and health statistics, housing data, economic and trade figures, environmental reports and other information.

What had been one of the most successful basketball seasons in St. John's history came to a crushing end tonight. The Redmen, making only their second Final Four appearance and their first under Coach Lou Carnesecca, suffered their most one- sided defeat this season, losing to Georgetown, 77-59. In defeating St. John's for the third consecutive time this season, Georgetown earned its second consecutive berth in the National Collegiate Athletic Association championship game. Last year the Hoyas defeated Houston in the final, 84-75.

WASHINGTON, D.C. THE six members of Connecticut's delegation in the House of Representatives pass each other in receiving lines and in the halls of the Capitol, but it was not until last week that all of them sat in the same room and exchanged views in public on some of the issues vital to their state. The meeting was in a two-hour breakfast sponsored by visiting city and town officials from Connecticut.The Representatives discussed tax policy and whether Congress should heed a Reagan Administration proposal to cut a key municipal aid program, general revenue sharing. The three Democrats and three Republicans displayed some of the political independence that has long marked the Connecticut delegation. Republicans spoke out against President Reagan's foreign and domestic policies; Democrats spoke of the need to cut spending and backed away from any tax increases.