August 8, 1983

Paul Deane's two shopping carts, tied end to end, bounced up and down along Boone Avenue in the South Bronx, his load of empty beer cans clanking with every pothole. Mr. Deane, a thin, bearded man who is 52 years old and unemployed, was headed for a recycling center that would pay him 21 cents a pound for his trove of aluminum cans. ''I pick up 40 or 50 bucks a week, more on the weekends if the weather holds and there are lots of ball games,'' he said. Last month, the recycling center - run by Bronx 2000, a nonprofit development corporation - paid out more than $20,000, largely to the unemployed who brought boxes and carts filled with aluminum cans.

Under the pressure of Jack Nicklaus's presence beside the 18th green, with Nicklaus waiting against the possibility of a one-stroke error that would force a tie, Hal Sutton made the par 4 he needed on the final hole today and won the 65th Professional Golfers' Association Championship by one shot. Until the leaders' last six holes, the final round of the championship had looked like a yawner with Sutton cruising on a five-stroke lead. Then Sutton bogeyed three holes in a row while Nicklaus and Peter Jacobsen were making runs at him. Sutton later said his thinking broke down - from aggressiveness, he switched unwittingly to conservatism.

The young boy's mother put one hand behind his head as her other hand guided a heaping forkful of limp, gray eggplant inexorably toward his mouth. He opened his mouth slightly only after closing his eyes, and gulped down the goo with an awful grimace. It may have been the longest night in his life, the night of the annual Vineland Eggplant Dinner, a harvest ritual feast that lasts for hours as one eggplant concoction after another is served - nine courses in all, from the buffalo soup with eggplant dumplings right through the eggplant cake. And eggplant wine, of course, to wash it down.

Competing for the first time for female students, both Barnard and Columbia College officials say they are pleased with the freshman classes they were able to attract for the fall. Barnard, which decided last year to remain a women's college while its male counterpart across the street became coeducational, recorded a drop in the number of its applicants. But Barnard officials say the freshman class is of about the same caliber as last year's. ''We are very pleased with the way things went,'' said Barnard's president, Ellen V. Futter. ''It's a very telling sign that indicates we have a strong appeal and a clientele of our own.''

The new farm trade agreements with the Soviet Union and China have improved prospects for United States agriculture exports, but American farmers are not cheering yet. True, the Soviet Union agreed to a new five-year grain agreement with the United States on July 28 that increases the minimum purchase by 50 percent. And China has returned to United States markets after the settlement of a textile trade dispute between the two countries, ending a boycott of American farm products that dragged on for most of this year. In addition, trade skirmishes with the European Economic Community that threatened to erupt into a full- scale agricultural trade war have just about ceased.