What was going on when I was born?

MONT ST. MICHEL, surrounded by ramparts and crowned by its great spired abbey, floats at high tide in the Bay of Mont St. Michel off the coast of Normandy.

IN 1518, as Spanish explorers were prowling the Caribbean coast of Mexico, they were amazed to espy from their ship the Mayan city of Tulum, perched on a rocky bluff. Juan Diaz, the chaplain on that voyage, later re called: "Almost at sunset we saw in the distance a town or village so large that the city of Seville could not be better or larger."

Today is the cut-off date for eligibility for this year's Tony Awards and thus marks the unofficial conclusion of the 1979-80 Broadway season. Tomorrow the nominations for the best productions and performances will be made and shortly thereafter the voting will get under way, leading to the presentation of the awards on June 8.

WASHINGTON, May 10--Secretary of State Edmund S. Muskie has recalled the Ambassadors to Israel and Egypt for an urgent review of the slow-moving Palestinian autonomy talks and to prepare for the next step if the negotiations fail to make significant progress by the May 26 target date.

HARTFORD FOR government and citizen alike, income is up but costs are up even more, and frustration is nibbling away at old attitudes just as inflation is nibbling at the dollar.

ONCE upon a time every tribe or town had its storyteller, the person around whom every one would gather to hear tribal lore or history or tall tales.

The City Planning Commission has required a proposed $65 million office building at 805 Third Avenue at 50th Street to be redesigned to contain two fewer office floors than the developer had already rented.

PORT JEFFERSON NEAR the Norchville petroleum dock here the other day, a rubber raft with three scientists bobbed 150 feet offshore, struggling against heavy winds.

THE classic "old boy" network has been adapted by professional women into a self-help chain of thou sands of women in 30 states and the District of Columbia. Women in many occupations--artists, bookkeepers, lawyers, writers--have voluntarily established formal groups dedicated to assisting one another in getting better jobs--or just coping with complicated lives.

KINGSTON, Jamaica, May 10--A pig snuffled through the garbage on Maiden Lane in the Kingston slum of Southside and settled into a pool of dirty water. A few doors away, Yvonne Morgan, a 20year-old mother of three, twisted to relieve the pressure of the bullet still left in her stomach after an incident that has shocked a nation accustomed to violence.

BRUNCHES show that Sunday is different, reassuring us that we are at leisure. They have a certain formality, too: The common alternatives are the full layabed life with breakfast tray or the hel ter-skelter, icebox-raiding, pickup meal. So, determined to get up and ...