What was going on when I was born?

The small snapshot could be a tourist's memento. It shows several people sitting around a wooden picnic table in a Greek town. The sun is bright, and the vines and lush Mediterranean vegetation give the sense of an arbor in the garden behind. There are several older Greek women, their hair tied by scarves, peasant-style, their faces weathered and lined, and at least two apparent tourists, a man and a striking young woman with short blond hair. The man is Nicholas Gage, whose book ''Eleni'' chronicles the torture and murder of his mother in 1948 by Communist guerrillas during the Greek civil war, and his own return to Greece some 30 years later to search for his mother's killers. Some of the village women are his relatives, peasants who still live in the village of Lia where his mother's martyrdom occurred. The blond woman is the actress Kate Nelligan, who joins the town's ranks temporarily to play Eleni, who gave her life so that her children might escape to freedom, in the film version of Mr. Gage's book. The film, in which John Malkovich co-stars as Mr. Gage, opens Friday at Cinema 1.

Subduing the Dollar Will the attack on the dollar, mounted a month ago by the Group of Five industrial nations, bring down the currency's value enough to stimulate exports and ease the Congressional pressure for protectionism? So far, that achievement is not in sight. At best, the steps taken amount to a quick and temporary fix, says Edward Yardeni, chief economist for Prudential-Bache Securities Inc. True, the currency is down about 18 percent, on a trade weighted basis, from its February peak, with most of the slide coming since Sept. 22, when the United States, Japan, France, Britain and West Germany announced they would intervene by selling dollars in international markets to lower the currency's value. And the group's agreement did slow Congress's drive for protectionist legislation - a delay that ''temporarily reduced the downside risks for the economy,'' said Mr. Yardeni. Like many economists, he fears that fallout from such laws - inflation and retaliation on the part of trading partners, for example - could produce an economic slowdown in the United States.

SEVERAL decades ago, when tax assessors would show up at airports around the state, a lot of the planes they wanted to tax weren't there. Many plane owners, in what was known as the ''Oct. 1 Flyaway'' would take their planes out of the state to avoid paying the local property tax. Over the years, there have been state legislators who wanted to get all the planes they could on the local tax rolls and who tried, and failed, to replace the property tax with a registration fee. Another attempt will be made this year, but for the first time the lawmakers will be armed with statistics to back up their suspicion of widespread avoidance of the tax. Those statistics indicate that taxes are being collected on only half of all the planes in the state. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, 2,578 planes were registered in the state last year, but according to state officials, taxes were paid on only 1,244 planes.

A new medical building in which doctors will be able to rent space by the hour is to open next month in Murray Hill a block and a half from the New York University Medical Center complex. Among the project's developers is Dr. Michael Reitano, a 27-year-old internist, who came up with the idea of renting space on a time-use basis after he was unable to find affordable midtown office space for himself.

Stunningly, incredibly, the Kansas City Royals staged their comeback of comebacks tonight. The St. Louis Cardinals were two outs from winning the World Series, and the Royals snatched the game from their grasp. The teams will learn Sunday night if the Royals grabbed the Series as well. The Royals forced the seventh and deciding game because Dane Iorg, batting for only the second time in the Series, looped a pinch-hit, broken-bat, two-run single to right field in the ninth inning that gave Kansas City a 2-1 victory and evened the Series at three games each. The Royals had been down three games to one, but then, they also had been down three games to one to Toronto in the American League pennant playoff and won. Before that, they had to catch and overtake the California Angels with a month to go in the regular season for the American League West championship.

In a sharp departure from the past, the nation's major police associations are fighting for controls on pistols, adding a new element to the long, bitter struggle over regulation of firearms. The police lobby has been active in recent months at both the national and state levels and is currently pitted against the National Rifle Association in opposition to a bill before Congress to reduce Federal regulation of interstate gun sales. In the past, the nation's law-enforcement officers remained mostly in the background on issues related to gun control. While some big-city police chiefs testified for more controls, much of the rank and file, according to all accounts, embraced many of the goals of the rifle association, the chief lobby opposing controls. Police influence on legislation was therefore muted.

Military officials said today that the cooperation of John A. Walker Jr. in a Navy spy case will allow them to prepare a much more accurate assessment of the se= curity breach caused by what they say was nearly two decades of espionage. The officials said that under a plea bargain with prosecutors, Mr. Walker has agreed to provide the Government with a detailed accounting of what he passed to Soviet intelligence agents. Prosecutors have described Mr. Walker, a 47-year-old retired Navy communications specialist, as the mastermind of the espionage ring. In addition, one official said that recent high-level Soviet defectors are being questioned about how the Soviet Government used the information. The defectors, he said, could help verify the account that Mr. Walker was expected to provide.

''ARM yourself against high mortgage payments,'' Eastern Savings Bank states in a recent newspaper advertisement for adjustable rate mortgages, or ARM's. The pun may be catchy, but that ARM - the bank's most prominently featured loan - is no weapon against high mortgage payments. The interest rate is adjusted every year, and even though the amount of each annual increase is limited, monthly payments still can increase by as much as 58 percent in three years - from $786 to $1,244 a month on a $100,000 mortgage. ''We're trying to help customers, but we can't afford a full-page advertisement to explain every mortgage,'' said Raymond Goldstein, Eastern's vice president. The two other loans in the advertisement, he said, guaranteed low payments for the first three to five years and were ideal for people who planned to own their homes only for a short time.

SOME trudge home every day to an empty house. Others have to be the grown-up for younger brothers and sisters. Still others are locked out of their homes. These are ''latch-key'' children. The term dates to a time when children of working parents were sent to school wearing keys on strings around their necks. Though keys are not usually worn around necks these days, more and more children are believed to be alone at home after school. ''We don't call them 'latch-key' kids anymore because it's such a negative term,'' said Dr. Susan Karr, liaison to the state's Child Care Advisory Council from the Division on Women of the state's Department of Community Affairs. ''We call them children in self care, since they care for themselves.'' John E. Radig, chairman of the New Jersey Coalition for School Age Child Care, a group promoting quality care for children before and after school, said that parents were ''often afraid there's even more danger in the house, and so they leave children outside or send them anywhere there's possibly an adult and a temperature of 70.''

King Hussein, increasingly angry at Yasir Arafat, may threaten to drop the Palestinian leader from his peace efforts to force him to make an unequivocal declaration recognizing Israel and renouncing violence, according to Palestinian, Jordanian and Western diplomatic sources. The showdown is expected on Monday at a meeting scheduled here between the Jordanian King and the Palestine Liberation Organization chairman. A 'Hard Squeeze' on Arafat ''This is a hard squeeze'' on Mr. Arafat, one Western diplomat said. But dropping Mr. Arafat from the latest peace effort could raise new problems for King Hussein, the sources said, and given the constantly shifting alliances of the Middle East, the result of Monday's meeting is far from certain.

THE gray stationwagon inched along in the midtown traffic at a considerably slower pace than Bill Rodgers and Frank Shorter are capable of running. The ancient marathoners were passengers, being briefed on the state of New York City politics by Fred Lebow, president of the New York Road Runners Club. They were behind schedule for an appearance at City Hall where they would endorse the re-election of Mayor Koch, who also knows a thing or two about running. Rodgers and Shorter reflected on how times have changed. In 1976, it required a persistent sales pitch by Lebow to arrange a similiar meeting with Mayor Abraham Beame on the eve of the first New York City Marathon to be run through the city streets - in all five boroughs. In those days, runners were not a special-interest group wearing, ''Keep the Mayor, Mayor'' buttons as Rodgers and Shorter did in their recent get-together with Koch. But Rodgers and Shorter could appreciate the value of good publicity. The New York City Marathon is a big plus for the city, painting it in a positive light. Politicians like to hitch their coattails to a winner.

The Defense Department, in guidelines for testing active military personnel for AIDS, has barred the automatic dismissal of individuals who, in the course of the testing, acknowledge that they are homosexuals or drug users. The memorandum, issued Friday, says acknowledgments made in testing for AIDS, acquired immune deficiency syndrome, cannot be used ''for punitive action against an individual.'' This means the information cannot be used to start discharge proceedings against an individual, Lieut. Col. Pete Wyro, a Pentagon spokesman, said today. Information derived from other, separate sources could still be used to discharge both homosexuals and drug users. Under Pentagon policy homosexuals are discharged as ''incompatible'' with the military. Drug use warrants discharge for misconduct.