What was going on when I was born?

"It's--well--gorgeous," said Barry Ingham, a Salt Lake City insurance executive, searching for the right superlative to describe Lake Powell in southern Utah. He and his family were casting off their 43-foot houseboat to spend a week cruising the sandstone cliff-edged waterways that break off the vast lake.

WASHINGTON, June 7--President Carter directed the Justice Department today to move quickly to expel Cuban refugees who committed "serious crimes" in Cuba and to expel or prosecute those found to be responsible for the rioting last Sunday night at Fort Chaffee, Ark.

LONDON--Not far from the threeand-a-half-acre tent housing the main exhibits of the Chelsea Flower Show late in May hung a simple hand-lettered sign. "This," it said, referring to the spindly implement that stood beneath, "is the best leaf rake in the world."

JERUSALEM--Ideally, there ought to be no reason why Jews cannot go up to a state-owned hilltop of untilled, stony land two or three miles from an Arab village and live there in peace. But it has turned out to be impossible. The barriers of religion, language, ethnicity and national identity are too strong, the suspicions too deep ...

NEW JERSEY theatergoers can breathe easier now. The Paper Mill Playhouse will be rebuilt, with September 1981 as the target date for reopening.

MINEOLA THE first hint of the Long Island Lighting Company's $228 million proposed rate increase was the loose leaf notebooks. Unlike Lilco's annual report, which had contained 38 pages and a full-color sketch of the Shoreham nuclear generating plant, these four notebooks weighed 15 pounds and contained at least 500 pages.

NEW ORLEANS--From the moment the 200 delegates stepped off the plane here last week, it was clear that this was no ordinary banking convention. Praline-sweet hostesses, adorned in the hoop skirts of the antebellum ...

The hotel chef in ''The Shining'' is supposed to have remarkable psychic powers, but the movie never explains the strangest of this man's idiosyncrasies: he can smell trouble from Miami to Colorado, but he doesn't detect a killer standing 10 feet away from him, armed with an ax and wearing a horrible grin. The movie's ghostly butler starts out with the name of Charles Grady, but he somehow becomes Delbert Grady before the story is finished. The caption on a closing photograph of Jack Nicholson utterly defies explanation. And the director, Stanley Kubrick, once again leaves his audiences asking a familiar question: How can anyone make a film so fastidiously beautiful and still leave so many loose ends? ''The Shining'' may be a horror film, but it very much fits the Kubrick mold. First and foremost, it is mesmerizingly lovely, so handsome you may be halfway out of the theater before those nagging questions arise. Yet, like ''A Clockwork Orange'' or ''2001: A Space Odyssey,'' this is a movie that barely makes sense upon examination. Most of the small details seem meticulously chosen, but there's no evidence that corresponding care has been taken with the film's central concerns.

WASHINGTON, June 7--The ease with which Ronald Reagan rolled through the Republican primaries has left the former California Governor optimistic about his prospects for winning the Presidency next fall but essentially untested for what his lieutenants expect to be a bitterly fought campaign.

NEW JERSEY Democrats, who gave Senator Edward M. Kennedy a lopsided victory over President Carter in the Presidential primary election last Tuesday, were more upset over the state of the economy than voters in four other key states and had a lower opinion of Mr. Carter's leadership.