What was going on when I was born?

''THE wind would blow the oily spray back on you through the open doors of the helicopter,'' Frank Garofalo said, recalling his seven months with a chemical platoon in Vietnam. ''We had special fatigues that were just all full of what we called defoliant. I had no idea that it was called Agent Orange.'' It was not until last year, Mr. Garofalo said, when he showed the state's Agent Orange Commission photographs of ''barrels with orange rings around them'' that he found out what he had been spraying. ''I was a young kid, only 20, and you didn't question authority,'' he said. ''Things have changed since then. We learned to question authority a little more.''

A plan to tie businesses, industries and new housing along the Route 110 corridor in Melville into the Southwest Sewer District is under debate in the Town of Huntington. The Town Board will vote Tuesday to schedule a public hearing on the plan, according to Supervisor John J. O'Neil. The plan entails forming a new sewer district in Melville to collect and treat industrial and domestic waste before dumping it into the pipes of the adjoining Southwest District. Many town officials believe the proposed district is needed to protect groundwater supplies and foster continued development in the rapidly growing Melville area. But they anticipate that the construction history of the Southwest Sewer District, which led to charges of patronage in letting contracts, and the cost overruns and high taxes associated with the project will invite public opposition to the proposal.

''The glass container makers, who have been losing customers to both the plastic and metal container industries for years, are now fighting for survival,'' said H. Edward Schollmeyer, who monitors the struggle for Paine Webber Inc. ''By the end of 1985, we believe only a few will still be around.'' The latest blow comes from the soft-drink industry in the form of a three-liter plastic bottle, now starting to appear on supermarket shelves in the South.

ONE key to understanding power in Washington is knowing which election - the one to come, or the one just past - counts most. In 1981, President Reagan had a high-riding honeymoon because the capital was in the thrall of the Republicans' 1980 sweep. By early 1982, with the midterm elections approaching, his party was in a defensive mood. This year, normal rhythms seem upset. With astonishing speed, Washington - if not the public - is discounting Mr. Reagan's 1984 landslide, and power, initiative and political talent are ebbing away from the White House. The burst of Cabinet and staff switches last week was but another symptom of the dynamics of change. After triumphantly proclaiming that he would keep his winning team, President Reagan has found himself with new Cabinet officers in the Treasury, Interior, Energy and Education Departments and a new White House chief of staff. Yet the motion brought in no new faces. Nor did it seem to signal a grand new strategy, but rather a battle against tired blood by shuffling the lineup.

WHEN President Reagan announced the surprise job-swap of Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan and White House chief of staff James A. Baker 3d, two of his closest aides, most of the immediate reaction centered on the personal chemistry each would bring to his new role and the relative power each would exert. Though such personal details intrigue Washington insiders, in fact the personnel shuffle in the higher reaches of the Reagan Administration reflects major changes in the economic policymaking process itself. In a city that for more than two decades has elevated economists to the highest ranks of government, this Administration continues to shun, even publicly ridicule, these professionals. And now, Mr. Regan, one of the economists' sternest critics, a man without formal economic training and one who came to Washington from Wall Street without any clearly enunciated ideas on economic policy, has emerged as the President's top strategist and the major architect of his economic policy. It was Mr. Regan, who said a year ago that Martin S. Feldstein - an eminent professor from Harvard University who was then chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors - should throw away his annual economic report because it raised doubts about some Administration policies. The same Mr. Regan, in his new role as gate-keeper to the Oval Office, will control access to the President of any economist or purveyor of economic thought or policy.

Senior Reagan Administration officials said today that the Geneva agreement to begin three sets of arms negotiations had left unresolved the key question of whether a failure in one set of talks could derail progress in the others. As a result, officials said, the new negotiations could be imperiled even before they start by a disagreement over ''linkage'' - with progress on the American goal of reducing nuclear weapons possibly held hostage by a Soviet insistence that the United States agree to halt its program of research into space weapons. Edward L. Rowny, the head of the American delegation to the strategic arms talks in Geneva, said in a televised interview today that he could not deny that there could be problems in negotiations if the Soviet Union demanded that agreements on the nuclear arms issues depended on an accord on barring space weaponry. ''There is an ambiguity there, I grant you,'' one official said, ''and only time will tell if it stands in the way of an agreement.''

Their currencies may be worth less each day, in terms of dollars, but investors in European stock markets are enjoying booming times. Since last Dec. 1, for example, stock averages have jumped 30 percent in London, 40 percent in the Netherlands, 22 percent in Switzerland and 15 percent in West Germany, says David D. Hale, chief economist at Kemper Financial Services, Chicago.

Simon Rattle, who - as principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic - makes his New York debut this week will turn 30 in the process. His birthday falls on Saturday, when he will he and the Californians will appear at Brooklyn College; on Friday, there will be a concert at Carnegie Hall and on Sunday at Avery Fisher Hall. But the biggest surprise about this debut by the most brilliantly successful conductor of the younger generation in Britain - the perception, power and clarity of whose work has been acclaimed internationally - is not the age at which it is occurring, but the fact that it did not happen long ago. Mr. Rattle has been invited to the Metropolitan Opera, and he has been invited to the New York Philharmonic. He has turned down both. And before accepting the position of principal guest conductor in Los Angeles in 1982, he was offered the principal conductorship there as successor to Carlo Maria Giulini. He turned it down. Now Mr. Rattle works with the Los Angeles' orchestra new principal conductor, Andre Previn, and he is pleased about that.

The Roman Catholic Bishop of Albany has obtained a temporary court order blocking efforts by two Planned Parenthood clinics to begin providing abortions. Attorneys for the Bishop, Howard J. Hubbard, got the order Friday afternoon, just hours after Planned Parenthood had received approval from the State Health Department to offer abortions at clinics in Albany and Hudson. The order, by State Supreme Court Justice John Pennock, bars the department from issuing a final operating license to Upper Hudson Planned Parenthood pending a hearing Jan. 25. In a statement, Bishop Hubbard accused the Health Department of failing to follow correct procedures in approving Planned Parenthood's application. But he also noted his church's theological rejection of abortion.

To the Sports Editor: There has been a flood of controversy surrounding the awarding of the college football national championship to the Brigham Young Cougars of Provo, Utah. The arguments have centered on the Cougars' alleged ''weak schedule.''

-interest rates has been good news for home buyers. But probably nobody has followed the numbers as closely as the people who signed up for expensive, fixed-rate mortgages in the last few years. Fixed-rate mortgages now can be had for about 13 percent compared with the 16 to 19 percent mortgages that were written in 1981 and 1982, when rates peaked. Other interested parties are the consumers who got stuck with the first series of adjustable mortgages, which usually lacked limits on rate increases and other protections. Some of these people are refinancing for peace of mind.

The history of the human figure is all but inseparable from the history of Western art. Our sense of Classical Greece, Republican Rome, 6th-century Byzantium and 15th-century Florence has a great deal to do with the artistic images of men and women those periods have passed down to us. We can still read ourselves on the face of art through the 1950s, when the ravaged and defiant images of Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti and Willem de Kooning tell us nearly everything we need to know about life in the wake of modern war. In late modernism, however, the history of art and the history of the human figure was all but sundered. In Pop Art the human figure turned into a caricature. Minimalism, Color Field painting and Conceptual art proclaimed triumphantly that the painted and sculpted human figure had become an anachronism. In Environmental Art the human figure was a strong but usually anonymous presence. If the absence of the human figure was all right in age of theory and an esthetic orthodoxy, it was not all right once the late modernist orthodoxy began to break down.