What was going on when I was born?

On a stormy August evening in 1981, a gray colt was led into the yearling sales ring at Saratoga and Roger Laurin prepared to raise his hand and bid on the colt. Suddenly all the lights went out in the pavilion. ''We took it as an omen,'' said Robert Levy today, a few minutes after walking out of the winner's circle at Hialeah Park after the Flamingo Stakes. ''The colt was by Little Current, and I figured that too little current made the lights go out. I wanted to name him Lights Out, but it was my partners' - Howard Kaskel and Bob Baker's - turn to pick the name.''

BY now the Phillies are old news, pardon the expression, but still i ntriguing: This season the Phillies will be fielding some of the o ldest players in baseball, and if they go on to win the World S eries, they would probably be the oldest team in history to do so. O n opening day, Tuesday against the Mets, each of the Phillies' s tarting players except one will be 30 years old or over. Two will be4 0 or over. Pete Rose, scheduled for right field, will be 42 next week, and Steve Carlton, the left-hander and last season's Cy Young Award winner, is 38. In the offseason, the Phillies obtained Joe Morgan, 39, to play second base, and Tony Perez, soon 41, to spell Rose at first and pinch-hit. They also picked up the outfielder Bill Robinson, 40 in June. In the bullpen are Ron Reed, 40, and Tug McGraw, 39 in August.

Paul Taylor, who studied art in college before being won over to the dance, is highly regarded for his astute taste in stage designers. His keen visual instincts, and predisposition to artistic adventure, have led him over the years to engage young artists who later went on to become some of the greatest names in modern American painting. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and Ellsworth Kelly all worked with him in the early days of his company and of their careers, and Alex Katz is no exception. A penniless young painter in 1960 when he began collaborating with Mr. Taylor, Mr. Katz is today one of the foremost proponents of modern realist painting. He is perhaps best known to the public, however, for the enormous mural of 23 women's heads, each 20 feet high, that he designed in 1977 to sit atop a Times Square building at 42d Street and Seventh Avenue. As a designer for the stage he is no less bold. His avowed goal is not to create sets that merely adorn the stage, but rather sets that are, in his phrase, ''aggressive.'' In those terms, Mr. Katz and Mr. Taylor would seem to be made for each other. Their latest collaboration, ''Sunset,'' will receive its world premiere on Wednesday, the second day of a month-long run of the Paul Taylor Dance Company at City Center.

JUST about everybody - in Washington as much as on Wall Street - agrees that the economy is off the ground after a severe recession. The preliminary ''flash'' estimate by the Commerce Department indicates that the gross national product rose at an annual rate of about 4 percent in the first quarter - subpar by standards of past economic recoveries, but still the best performance in two years. The crowds of Easter shoppers in the stores last weekend suggest that people are going back to work and are loosening up their purse strings. The consensus among forecasters is that the quarterly growth rate in the economy will accelerate to 5 percent or better by the end of the year. However, there is plenty to worry about. The fear -which is understandable in light of the sputtering performance of the United States economy for the past four years - is that interest rates may surge long before the recovery has a chance to gain momentum. This could easily choke off the boomlet in housing, and knock the automobile market back to the depressed levels registered last spring.

The Labor Department intends to issue new rules that relax requirements for Federal contractors to recruit and promote blacks, women and Hispanic people. The department has decided to go ahead with many of the proposals that generated intense criticism from civil rights advocates when they were first issued 19 months ago. But business organizations said the new affirmative action rules would be an improvement over the existing rules because they would reduce the burden on employers and eliminate some of the uncertainty about Federal requirements. 20,000 Companies Affected Labor Department officials said 20,000 to 30,000 companies, including nearly all the biggest corporations in the nation, were subject to affirmative action requirements because they did business with the Government. Other companies look to the Federal rules for guidance when they establish voluntary affirmative action programs.

''This is the first grown-up year for us,'' says Michael Fuchs, president of the entertainment division at Home Box Office, the nation's largest pay television service. Having built a highly profitable business over the past decade by offering uncut movies without commercial interruptions on cable television, HBO has committed more than $60 million during the next two years for new programming. The objective is to attract new viewers to its already existing audience of 12 million and thus increase its revenues. Many of the more than 40 cable-television services now in operation provide exclusive programs of one sort or another -from low-budget talk shows on the Cable Health Network to titillating soap operas on the Playboy Channel. But this year, HBO and to a lesser extent Showtime, which reaches a more modest 4 million subscribers, are for the first time meeting ABC, CBS and NBC head-on by offering program fare that until now has been the exclusive province of the networks: original made-for-television films, mini-series, and continuing comedy and drama series. And also for the first time, these two pay television services are earning enough revenue from their base of subscribers to spend comparable amounts of money on such programming as the networks, which rely principally on income from advertisers to finance their programs.

Yasir Arafat met with King Hussein today amid indications that the Palestine Liberation Organization will not authorize the King to enter into negotiations on the basis of President Reagan's Middle East peace plan. Neither side issued a statement after the 90-minute session this afternoon. However, a senior P.L.O. official said privately that his organization would not grant King Hussein any formal endorsement to take part in peace talks with Israel on the basis of the Middle East peace proposal announced by President Reagan last September. The King and Mr. Arafat held a second round of talks, which ended late tonight. A Jordanian spokesman said it would be decided on Sunday, after a meeting of the Joint Jordanian-Palestinian Coordinating Committee, whether further discussions were necessary. But given the P.L.O.'s stance, more talks appeared unlikely.

CLUSTERED in only a few square blocks near the Roslyn Long Island Rail Road station there is an almost textbook-like display demonstrating the evolution of 20th-century housing policy in the United States. As 24 families look forward eagerly to home ownership - buying into the American dream they thought they could never achieve -they are characters in what may be the final pages of the story begun five decades ago when President Franklin D. Roosevelt directed the resources of the Federal Government to alleviate the plight of an ill-housed one-third of the nation. Under succeeding administrations of both parties, federally subsidized housing has moved through many chapters from publicly owned low-income housing projects to home ownership made possible by Federal aid toward mortgage payments. In Roslyn Heights, three of those chapters are represented by: - Laurel Homes, on Linden Court, a conventional, two-story, lowincome public housing project owned and operated by the North Hempstead Housing Authority, with 71 apartments, opened in 1956. Eligibility is limited to families with incomes of $5,900 to $13,400, according to family size. Their rent is set at 25 percent of gross family income, except for families on welfare, whose rent is fixed on a scale determined by the Nassau County Social Services Department.

Controversy over the defense of the American continent, namely how to deploy the proposed MX missile, was also due to start up again. A special Presidential commission decided last week that 100 MX's should be based in existing but strengthened Minuteman silos, a solution already rejected by Congress. The commission, named in January, was expected to report in about 10 days but whether Congress would change its mind is a ''tough call,'' according to an Administration official.

FOR weeks the attention of legislators, lobbyists and localities has been riveted on the state budget and how to change it. Now that the budget has finally passed and the State Legislature is taking a two-week break, there is time to reflect on what the legislators did to the budget and what they want to do about the main budget issues in the future. For Long Island, the adoption of the budget marks the close of still another battle over the distribution of state aid to education. The fight has taken on an almost ritualistic quality. First the Governor proposes huge reductions in aid to so-called wealthy districts, in order to give more to the poor ones. Then local school district superintendents and teachers flock to Albany with warnings of dire educational consequences if the cuts are made. State legislators assure their constituents that they will restore the aid. In negotiations with the Governor - or in past years, without him - the Legislature passes a budget restoring the aid to wealthy districts.

ON Monday afternoon, Marcia M. Lee sat in the County Office Building in White Plains trying to determine how the state budget, passed that morning, would affect Westchester. ''It's difficult to get information,'' she said. ''A lot of our delegation members were exhausted and left to go to sleep.'' One floor below, Guy T. Parisi was working at the same task. It was the end of the many hours both had spent in Albany in the last few weeks monitoring the budget negotiations. Dr. Lee is the county's Director of Intergovernmental Relations and Mr. Parisi is counsel to the County Board of Legislators. But when the State Legislature is in session, their function is to lobby for the county's legislative interests. The passage of the budget represented a benchmark by which to gauge their efforts.

THE American Shakespeare Theater ''has been our link to the outside world,'' said Edward J. Fennell, chairman of the Stratford Town Council, the other day. ''It's one of only three in the world and the only one in this country. It would just be unacceptable for us to lose it.'' Like many others in this town, Mr. Fennell is unhappy and somewhat angry over the prospect that the theater, which has presented plays and other entertainment since 1955, may soon be no more, a victim of bankruptcy. And yet, other residents of the primarily blue-collar town admit that Stratford has always been somewhat ambivalent toward the Shakespeare Theater, and has not always lent its full support to the theater's survival.