What was going on when I was born?

WALKING with President Reagan along the White House Colonnade from the Oval Office to the State Dining Room, the Soviet Foreign Minister, Eduard A. Shevardnadze, scanned the brightening Friday morning sky. ''Look, Mr. President,'' the Soviet official exclaimed. ''We have brought you the sun.'' Mr. Reagan, who chatted with Mr. Shevardnadze about the hurricane that skirted Washington hours before, grinned. The comment reflected not only the faintly upbeat mood of last week's Reagan-Shevardnadze meeting, but the sense within the White House that the Geneva meeting between Mr. Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, in November may yield results despite what appear to be irreconcilable differences.

ONE year ago, Suffolk County faced such major financial problems that the County Executive, Peter F. Cohalan, proposed a bare-bones austerity budget for 1985. But things have changed drastically. Last week, Mr. Cohalan proposed a 1986 budget that would reduce county property taxes by nearly 15 percent. ''What a difference a year makes,'' Mr. Cohalan said. Much has changed in Suffolk government since last September, when a tax protest by the Long Island Lighting Company prompted Mr. Cohalan, then still a Lilco nemesis over his opposition to the Shoreham nuclear plant, to propose his austerity budget.

The pennant race may be all but done, but Dave Winfield still is one of the game's most aggressive hitters, Don Mattingly's swing is still line-drive sweet, Rickey Henderson is still menacingly fast, and Ron Guidry, even less than perfect, can still throw the right pitch in the crucial situation. In a season that seems headed ultimately for disappointment, yesterday was a day for appreciating what is right about the Yankees. They beat the Baltimore Orioles at the Stadium, 6-5, with two runs in the ninth. Winfield stroked a line-drive single to left field, bringing home Henderson with the winning run, just after Mattingly was intentionally walked, and two batters after Ken Griffey had grounded out to bring in the tying run.

THE first sign that the Reagan Administration was making a major change in its international economic policy came last April in a speech that Secretary of State George Shultz made at Princeton. Mr. Shultz defended the Administration's economic policies - but for the first time, he conceded failures, particularly the swelling budget deficit. The very next day the new Treasury Secretary, James A. Baker 3d, appeared in Paris signaling a break in the Reagan approach to international economics. He said the Administration would consider calling an international conference to review the 12-year-old system of floating exchange rates - a system that has allowed the dollar to soar 40 percent over a five-year period. Last week these hints of change burst forth at New York's Plaza Hotel, before scores of television cameras, as the beginnings a new international economic policy - one almost diametrically opposed to the doctrine that the Administration has clung to for more than four years. The Government has finally shed its faith that market forces alone would reduce the value of the swollen dollar sufficiently to rekindle American exports.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music's 1985 Next Wave Festival is literally opening with a splash. For Pina Bausch's dance-theater extravanganza, ''Arien,'' which begins performances on Tuesday, the stage of BAM's opera house will be flooded with ankle-deep water. Two dozen actor-dancers from Miss Bausch's Wuppertaler Tanztheater will run frantically through the pool. A life-size hippopotamus (played by two actors) will then appear to oversee an ensemble psychodrama involving tables, chairs and other household objects. All this takes place to a prerecorded score of music by Mozart, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and others, plus Italian arias sung by Beniamino Gigli. Miss Bausch's appearance at the Next Wave festival is a triumphant return engagement to BAM, where she and her company first appeared in June 1984 following their American debut at the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles. The bravura theatrics, provocative images and rigorous physical discipline of her work have made Miss Bausch internationally renowned as the godmother of Neo-Expressionist dance-theater. Yet when pressed to generalize about the meaning of the work, she demurs. It must be seen, she insists, as a spectacle with secrets.

Rioting broke out tonight in a predominantly black area of London after a police inspector shot and wounded a black woman in a raid at her home. The police said the shooting, which occurred in an early-morning raid in which the woman's son was sought, was ''a tragic accident.'' Her family said she had been shot in the back. Black youths later attacked a police station, looted and burned shops, and threw gasoline bombs.

FOR nearly a year now, Robert Fomon's efforts have backfired as he sought to remove E. F. Hutton from the uncomfortable glare of public scrutiny and scandal. Faced with the evidence of an illegal check-overdraft scheme at Hutton, he discussed the case over lunch last November with his old friend, William French Smith, then the Attorney General, in the hope of postponing a Federal indictment. Last May, he tried again to minimize public scrutiny by pleading Hutton guilty to 2,000 felony counts, thus owning up in one fell swoop to the fraudulent overdrafting. When a scandal blew up anyway, he hired the respected former Attorney General, Griffin B. Bell, to investigate the illegal scheme and issue a report that, Mr. Fomon hoped, would spell the final chapter in the affair. ''I never dreamed that there would be an indictment,'' said Mr. Fomon, a dapper, gray-haired, smallish man who has been Hutton's chairman for 15 years. ''I thought at most that there would be some kind of injunctive action. And then I thought that the guilty plea would end it.''

President Reagan today welcomed new Soviet arms proposals that reportedly call for 50 percent cuts in the offensive nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers. He said the United States was ''ready for tough but fair'' negotiations. At the same time, Mr. Reagan expressed the hope that the arms talks ''will be free of preconditions and other obstacles to progress.'' 'Progress Can Be Made' In a generally optimistic assessment of his three hours of talks on Friday with the Soviet Foreign Minister, Mr. Reagan said that despite fundamental differences between the United States and the Soviet Union, ''progress can be made'' in negotiations in Geneva on nuclear and space weapons.

HIGH construction costs, restrictive zoning, the long approval process and exorbitant land costs are among the many factors that deter development in New York City, real-estate professionals say. But the wild card in this pack of risks, they add, is the presence of rent-regulated tenants on a development site. Developers say that they never know how long it will take or how much it will cost to relocate tenants, and that the uncertainty and added risk discourages development of all sorts in the city. Mayor Koch agrees and has said that lost or delayed development of deteriorated, underused sites exacerbates the city's housing crisis and slows its economic growth. He has announced plans to remove legal hurdles for needed development. At the same time, there is little public support for developers who want to replace moderately priced rental units with a comparable number of high-priced apartments, and the Legislature is considering more rigorous protections for tenants who live in sound housing.

SO what do you suppose the quarterback was doing while the team was practicing kickoff returns the other day. Watching? Chatting with the coach? Granting an interview? To know Jim McMahon, the Chicago Bears' quarterback, is to know that any of those possibilities would be preposterous. He was running downfield with the kickoff team, of course, sort of volunteering his body to science. Heaven forbid he should stand aside quietly until it was his turn to perform the practice rituals of running the Bears' offense. He can't sit still. On the field. Off the field. Anywhere. He never has.

More than one million homes and businesses across the metropolitan area remained without power yesterday in the wake of Hurricane Gloria, and utilities said it might take up to a week to restore full service. On Long Island and in Connecticut, the areas hit hardest by Gloria's dash up the coast Friday, nearly half of the residents remained blacked out as crews labored to clear away thousands of downed trees, replace utility poles and splice severed power lines. ''Nothing like this has ever happened here,'' said Carol Clawson, a spokesman for the Long Island Lighting Company, which restored power to 300,000 homes during the day, but still had 400,000 customers on the blackout list. Tours by Governors ''Essentially,'' Miss Clawson added, ''we're going to have to rebuild the entire system. There's no estimate yet on what this may cost.''

THE State Board of Education meets this week to vote on a recommendation that the state spell out what a high school student should know before graduating. An advisory panel on graduation and course requirements, in its report to the board, rejected so-called exit testing, in which high school seniors have to pass a basic skills exam to get a diploma. ''The support for exit testing seems to arise from a perception that many students are graduating from high school who can neither read nor write,'' the 24-member panel said. ''There is little evidence that this perception is accurate. It seems to be based on isolated examples rather than solid evidence.''