What was going on when I was born?

A working lunch of the National Security Council had just adjourned in the Cabinet Room of the White House early Friday afternoon when President Reagan said to Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., ''Al, may I see you for a moment?'' It was then, according to White House aides, that a stunned Secretary Haig learned that his offer to resign, made the day before, had been accepted, and that Mr. Reagan had selected George P. Shultz, a former Treasury Secretary, to replace him. Later in the afternoon, it was Mr. Haig who in turn stunned Mr. Reagan and his staff members by putting into his resignation letter a parting blast at the Administration. In recent months, Mr. Haig said, foreign policy had shifted from the ''careful course'' originally established by the President and himself.

HARTFORD THE General Assembly will begin another special session tomorrow in a rare bipartisan mood to deal quickly with flood relief and a few other matters and adjourn before election-year politics can intrude. If the legislative leaders of both parties can meet their goal of completing work by Wednesday, it would be in sharp contrast to the legislature's last special session on state fiscal problems, which dragged on for more than two months before ending last January. ''Here you have an emergency,'' said Richard F. Schneller, Democrat of Essex, the Senate majority leader, of the flood that struck the state on the weekend of June 5 and 6. ''We want to get programs in place.''

THE CORRESPONDENCE OF BORIS PASTERNAK AND OLGA FREIDENBERG 1910-1954. Compiled and Edited, With an Introduction, by Elliott Mossman. Translated by Elliott Mossman and Margaret Wettlin. Illustrated. 365 pp. New York: A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $19.95. THIS splendid book, excellently translated and edited and handsomely turned out, is an unexpected gift, a work of art salvaged from the physical and spiritual ruins of terrible years. Its rescue is largely due to Olga Freidenberg, who managed to save most of the letters and to preserve some cherished memories in a journal from which Elliott Mossman quotes liberally and which he describes as ''a retrospective diary of her life, composed in her last years.'' In essence, this collection, a historical and literary document of the first importance, is a dual self-portrait, all unconsciously drawn, by two gifted, courageous people, whose story adds a heroic chapter to the tragic annals of our century. Boris Pasternak and Olga Freidenberg were cousins. Their fathers, Leonid Pasternak and Mikhail Freidenberg, had had known each other since their boyhood in Odessa. Leonid's sister, Ann, married Mikhail, and later, when the Freidenbergs settled in St. Petersburg and the Pasternaks in Moscow, they exchanged frequent visits and spent summers together. The children were playmates always; and Olga and Boris, who were born in the same year, were fast friends. Their correspondence begins in the spring of 1910, when they were 20.

For Billie Jean King, every match at Wimbledon is an adventure these days. Last Thursday, the 38-year-old Mrs. King played her 100th singles match at the All England Club. No other tennis player is close to equaling that record. Today, Mrs. King recovered from triple match point in the second set for a 5-7, 7-6, 6-3 victory over Tanya Harford of South Africa. The triumph, her 88th since she first played here in 1961, moved her into the last 16.

The Yankees, who complained last month when a practice was called on a day off, were forced to work overtime last night for the second straight Saturday night. Partly because of Graig Nettles's 300th home run and Butch Wynegar's run-scoring single with two out in the ninth inning, and partly because of their own mistakes, the Yankees played their first 17-inning game since Aug. 2 and 3, 1978. were tied with Cleveland, 3-3, after 15 innings. As Saturday night turned into Sunday morning, the Yankees seemed certain to be stopped by the American League curfew, which does not permit an inning to start after 1 A.M. But the Yankees loaded the bases and Nettles scored the winning run at 1:08 A.M. when Ken Griffey, who was 0 for 6 and a walk up to that point, and hitless in his 20 times at bat. hit a sacrifice fly to right field, for a 4-3 victory. Early in the evening, Butch Wynegar's passed ball allowed the first Cleveland run to score, and a balk by Dave Righetti led to the second. Late at night and early in the morning, the Yankees left three runners at third base in the extra innings.

winning author who died at his home in Ossining on June 18, organized a club 16 years ago that he once described as "about as private as a telephone booth." His fellow members recalled it last week as a modest but scintillating salon. It was called the Friday Club and, most of the time, had four members who gathered every Friday for two hours of conversation and lunch. They were usually men who kept no office hours or who worked alone.

George P. Shultz, President Reagan's nominee for Secretary of State, will face an unusually large number of international crises as well as continuing institutional tensions between the White House and the State Department. President Reagan wants to take a firmer line on restricting Western trade with the Soviet Union, which implies dealing more firmly on the issue with Western Europe and Japan. There are also signs that the President intends to take a stronger position with Israel over further military moves in Lebanon. He is, in addition, expected to urge Britain to settle the Falkland Islands sovereignty dispute with Argentina.

GETTING one's international act together can be a problem, even for as smooth an operation as the monthlong Pepsico Summerfare Festival, which opens July 10 at the Performing Arts Center of the State University of New York. For the first time in its three-year history, there will be several important foreign companies involved. ''We had to prevail upon a local rabbi to help us with technical specifications mailed to us from the Habimah National Theater of Israel,'' said Karen Shafer, managing director of the center. ''Instructions for building the scenery arrived in Hebrew.''

ALBANY FOR the last year, whenever anyone proposed drastically revising the state's education-aid formula, the leader of the Senate Republican majority, Warren M. Anderson, said that any change would have to await a ruling by the state's highest court. The assumption by many here was that the court would throw out the current system and force politicians to grapple with the problem. But last week the Court of Appeals - in a case that could have meant tens of millions of dollars to Long Island's poorer school districts - upheld the current system. It ruled that in the absense of ''gross and glaring inadequacy,'' it was up to the Legislature to set state policy. With the ball out of the Court and back in the Assembly and the Senate, Mr. Anderson and other key legislators say that the issue is far from dead. How far it moves will depend largely on how much pressure advocates for change can bring to bear.

Bob Gilder scored the rarest of golf shots today, a double eagle, to take a six-stroke lead in the third round of the Manufacturers Hanover Westchester Classic. From the fairway of the 18th hole, a par 5 of 509 yards, Gilder hit his second shot, a 3-wood, 251 yards into the cup. It took three little bounces and rolled in the hole. From his position in the fairway Gilder was not certain where the ball went; judging by the noisy reaction of the gallery around the green, he deduced only that the ball had rolled close to the flagstick.

Officials of the National Football League warned yesterday that the use of cocaine had become so widespread among its players that it now posed a threat to the continued integrity of the game. Charles S. Jackson, the league's assistant director of security and drug abuse and a former undercover narcotics agent for the Yonkers Police Department, said he doubted that cocaine use had reached epidemic levels, as some officials fear. He said there was ''absolutely no evidence thus far'' that gambling interests had succeeded in using cocaine to corrupt the game. But he also said that ''the longer the problem of cocaine continues to grow, the greater the chance of it occurring.'' Mr. Jackson and other league officials said that only 17 players had been identified as ''chemically dependent'' on cocaine. But Mr. Jackson said in an interview that ''it was quite possible'' that as many as 40 to 50 players in the league had a ''chemical dependency on the drug'' and that hundreds of the league's 1,500 players were using it, many of them regularly.

A house near the railroad tracks is worth less than one near a c ountry club. A house on a busy main road is worth less than one witha swimming pool and a wooded lot. Finishing a basement will make a h ouse more valuable by giving it a family room. Right? Not necessarily, points out James MacCrate, an appraiser and broker, and a man who knows a lot about what is troubling homeowners who have to set a price for their houses today.