What was going on when I was born?

Nothing will change behind the Islanders' bench next season. Coach Al Arbour will stand there again, rarely smiling, seldom showing emotion and peering through his thick glasses. Arbour, who coached the Islanders to a second straight Stanley Cup championship last season, ended thoughts of retirement yesterday with an announcement that he will return as the Islander coach for the ninth straight season. He will continue to coach for as long as he chooses, evaluating things on a yearly basis, and when he is ready to give up coaching, he will become vice president for player and team development.

LONG ISLAND is going ''live'' on prime-time television Tuesday night, much to the delight of community groups that have been working over the last several years to get more television coverage of the Island by New York City stations. Some 300 Long Islanders from a cross section of the population, including critics of the Long Island Rail Road and the Long Island Lighting Company's Shoreham nuclear plant, will take part in what WNBC-TV describes as a ''live town meeting.'' The program will be broadcast live Tuesday at 8 P.M. from the Roosevelt Hall Theater on the Farmingdale campus of the State University of New York. Onstage, Gabe Pressman will play host to a panel of local experts discussing three key Long Island problems -transportation, pollution and utility rates. The hourlong forum will be rebroadcast next Sunday at 1:30 P.M.

Congress's wish was the Supreme Court's command last week, insofar as coequal branches of Government can defer to one another. Ruling in what it considered more a matter of national defense than equal protection under law, the Court held 6-3 that Congress is within its constitutional rights in limiting draft registration, and presumably the draft itself, to men.

Claudia Ryan, a psychiatric nurse practitioner at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, is purchasing a $40,000 condominium with the aid of a mortgage program begun this spring by her employers. ''It helps encourage me to stay on the job,'' said Miss Ryan, explaining that on a nurse's salary she would not have qualified for conventional financing on the apartment. The 13 1/2-percent loan is 3 percentage points below the rate she could have received at a local bank and permits her to put down only 10 percent instead of the customary 20 percent downpayment now required by most mortgagelending institutions. Ann Mellor, an English literature and poetry professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., has also purchased a home through the mortgage program offered by her employers. Last July, with the aid of C.O.I.N., Stanford's new Co-Investment Second Mortgage Program that provides loans of up to $150,000 at only 5 percent interest, Miss Mellor was able to qualify for a four-bedroom ranch-style house near the campus that sold for $205,000, an average sum for that area. The program provides the 5 percent interest in exchange for a share in the appreciation of the home when it is sold.

Summertime: At seashore resorts, the living is, as the song says, easy. Salt air. Soothing sunshine. Ocean swimming. Warm sands. What could be more benign? Millions of Americans seek these pleasures each summer, yet thousands of them have unhappy vacations because they fail to take the simple precautions needed to keep themselves healthy, even in such healthful environments as the Hamptons, Cape Cod, the Jersey Shore and the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Last summer 7,045 people were treated in the emergency room of Long Island's Southampton Hospital and more than 60 percent of them were suffering complaints that, though relatively minor, were ruining their holidays. Among the diagnoses recorded day after day from June to September in the emergency room's thick black logbook: sunburn, mild food poisoning, headaches, sprained ankles, cut feet, and flesh wounds inflicted by fishhooks that hooked fishermen rather than fish. At times, too, the sting of the jellyfish manifests itself in the emergency room's records. One evening last summer, for example, the doctors at Southampton Hospital examined five sprained ankles, four cases of painful sunburn and two of faces badly swollen by insect bites. ''Nothing particulary severe,'' said Dr. Raoul H. Renaud, the hospital's chief of emergency services. ''We offered sympathy as much as anything else.''

by-100-foot plot of land he owned in the quiet Fire Island community of Ocean Bay Park. For Mr. Ficara, the owner of a small computer business in Manhattan and a man of modest means, the letter symbolized an end to his status as a renter and the realization of his dream to build a home on Fire Island. The second letter Mr. Ficara opened, from United States Attorney Edward R. Korman, informed him that same morning, Jan. 19, 1979, that his land had become the property of the United States Government. His plans to build, the letter said, were in violation of zoning standards set by the National Park Service, the Government agency that runs Fire Island, and thus were a detriment to the island's environment. Mr. Ficara's property was acquired through a Declaration of Taking, a measure that severs an individual from his property swiftly, completely and without recourse. ''I couldn't believe that such a thing could happen in the United States,'' Mr. Ficara said. ''I didn't have a chance to fight in court. Bang, they just up and took it. My house would not have been a threat to Fire Island. There was no reason to condemn my land.''

year dynasty of Israel's Labor Party in 1977, is fighting again to foil the pollsters and politicians and foreign leaders who had settled into the complacent assumption, just months ago, that he was on his way out. In a passionate, militant campaign, and with skillful use of his platform as Prime Minister, he has scrambled back from the certainty of defeat in Tuesday's elections to insure at least a close race with Labor and its chairman, Shimon Peres. The returns will answer the crucial question of whether ''Beginism,'' as Mr. Peres has unflatteringly called the phenomenon, is an aberration or a trend, a fleeting ripple in Israeli politics or a sea change with deep implications for the country's future. The term conjures up conflicting images of Israel, the negative and positive alternatives of the same stereotype. Depending on one's biases, Mr. Begin and his country can seem either aggressive or tough, intolerant or proud, insensitive or firm, insulting or honest, narrow-minded or principled, autocratic or determined, mean or resolute.

B Y rights, the bond market should be enjoying a headlong, thrill-aminute rally. The bond market, after all, is supposed to be the running register of investors' information, predictions and beliefs about the coming trajectory of inflation. As inflation slows down, long-term interest rates, in theory, decline as well. And lower rates mean higher bond prices, which, in turn, define a rally. So goes the traditional logic of the bond market. Today all the elements are in place, but the market refuses to play its role. All the recent reports from the statistics mills in Washington and most of the forecasts from the consulting firms around the nation have trumpeted a singular message: Inflation is at last subsiding. Last week, Murray L. Weidenbaum, head of the President's Council of Economic Advisers, proclaimed the millennium. ''Double-digit inflation as a phenomenon,'' he said, ''is behind us.''

Just when Tip O'Neill thought it was safe to go back in the water.... The Speaker of the House and his loyal legions were victimized last week not so much by a Republican man-eater as by Democratic boll weevils. On a key procedural vote that party leaders hoped would regain for them the initiative that has steadily been slipping away to the White House, 29 conservative Democrats deserted to give Ronald Reagan the margin for his most impressive victory yet. At issue was a $38.2 billion package of budget cuts that the White House offered 10 days ago as an alternative to $37.7 billion carved out over the last several weeks by Democratic House committees. The leadership hit upon a strategy that, with their nominal 52-seat majority, seemed foolproof: To present the White House plan on the floor as six separate amendments, rather than as one entity, thus forcing politically embarrassing votes and jeopardizing passage.

The package of budget cuts passed by the House of Representatives on Friday represents a serious and unexpected setback for the region's fiscal health, officials of New York and New Jersey said yesterday. The cost to the region in Federal Medicaid funds, housing subsidies, development grants, welfare payments and other social programs could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming fiscal year and increasing amounts thereafter, the officials said. The Senate passed a similar bill Thursday, and the package now goes to a joint Senate-House conference for resolution of the remaining differences. Just two weeks ago, budgetary analysts were saying that committees in the Democratically controlled House had managed to ease the likely hurt of the Reagan Administration's proposed cuts. Julian Spirer, New York City's chief lobbyist in Washington, said then that the emerging picture looked ''much brighter'' than it had in March.

On Oct. 19, 1773, Dr. Samuel Johnson and his devoted biographer, James Boswell, reached the shores of the Scottish island of Iona in the Inner Hebrides. After what Dr. Johnson records as a tedious sail, the two men embraced on reaching the place ''whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge, and the blessings of religion.'' When a fellow New Yorker and I landed on Iona in the spring of last year, we had the island's checkered past in mind, but we went with another thought, too. It came from Kenneth Clark, creator of the BBC television series ''Civilization.'' ''Iona,'' Lord Clark wrote in his autobiography, ''gives me, more than anywhere else I know, a feeling of peace and freedom.'' Iona is only 3 1/2 miles long and 1 1/2 wide and has more sheep than people, but it occupies a special place in Britain's history. It was from there in A.D. 563 that St. Columba set out with 12 followers from Ireland to begin the conversion of Scotland to Christianity. The island also was a target of Norse plunderers and the scene of centuries of clan and religious warfare. Its ancient burial place contains the graves of kings, and its restored abbey and the ruins of a convent date from the 11th century.

An important changing of the guard occurs this week. Robert S. McNamara retires as president of the World Bank, turning over the reins to A.W. Clausen, former head of the Bank of America.