What was going on when I was born?

With an increasing number of assembly lines and showrooms becoming quiet dark places, General Motors and the United Auto Workers cut an unprecedented deal last week. As their contract talks got under way, the corporation and the union agreed to pass along to G.M. customers, dollar for dollar, any savings that result from U.A.W. wage and fringe concessions. Ford, caught by surprise in its separate negotiations, didn't immediately say whether it would go along with the passalong.

ALBANY FOR the next several months here, cartography - the art of drawing maps - will be power. The State Legislature is in the midst of redrawing the boundaries of every district in the State Senate and the Assembly, as well as the lines for the state's Congressional districts. For Long Island, the political changes wrought by reapportionment could be substantial. Though Republican-dominance in Nassau County has long insured the party of a major share of Nassau seats, many of the swing districts in the Legislature - particularly in t he Assembly- are to be found in both Nassau and Suffolk Counties.

NEWARK THE one thing that has been made clear in the murky circumstances surrounding the death of a Guardian Angels patrol leader here last month is that the police and the Angels had not been talking to each other. Each group had been operating in the city streets in the dark, alone. An Essex County grand jury that has been looking into what happened on the night of Dec. 30 is expected to make its determination within a week. Also, the Department of Justice has announced that it will investigate the shooting. At this point, there are two versions: One from the police, one from the Guardian Angels. According to the police, Officer Milton Medina, while on the roof of a tavern investigating a burglary attempt, heard a whistle and saw several people running toward his partner, Officer Angel Ramos, on the ground below. Officer Medina said that he fired his revolver, thinking that Officer Ramos was in danger.

FOR some, the first morning might be the hardest - the waking up and remembering that the familiar routine is gone. For others, that initial sensation of freedom is to be savored, a living testiment to those posters that read, ''Today is the first day of the rest of your life.'' The circumstances that bring about the change can be as varied as the reactions to it. There may have been a slow build-up, a quiet discontent mounting over the years and culminating in the words, ''I quit.'' Or, it might have come suddenly, in the unexpected and often shattering form of an announcement that, even when verbal, is colloquially called the pink slip. The loss of a job, through choice or circumstance, is frequently a major event in one's life -especially if there is a subsequent move to a new career. ''There aren't any studies that yield information about shifting careers per se,'' according to Samuel Ehrenhalt, regional commissioner of labor statistics for the Federal Bureau of Labor Statisics. But, he added, the changing economy and the emphasis on finding ''meaningful'' work have triggered an increasing number of such changes in the suburbs and elsewhere.

FOR three h ours last October, 40,120 ninth-grade students in Connecticut p ondered fractions and percentages, punctuation and the meanings of w ords in the state's third annual proficiency test. The test results, which were reported last week with the aid a phalanx of charts, statistics, press releases and explanatory comments by State Education Commissioner Mark R. Shedd and five advisers, was pronounced to be the most significant of the three tests because it was the first that could be compared with the preceding school year. Unlike the second and third tests, which were given in October, the first test was given in March. It was therefore of little use as a comparative measure with succeeding tests.

A new team has taken charge of preparing the assessment role for New York City with a new law in hand and new ideas on how to modernize the department. They are using advanced computerized techniques to determine the value of properties and threatening tough penalties on commercial property owners for falsifying information about a building's expenses and income. Every year about this time the city prepares a ''tentative assessment role'' that fixes a value on each of 850,000 pieces of property in New York City - from a two-family house in Queens to the General Motors Building. The list, scheduled for publication Feb. 1, is the first step toward collection of property taxes and it serves as the document on which property owners can begin, if they choose, to challenge their assessments. The new law on assessment is less than two months old and the New York City Department of Finance is still trying to figure out what it all means and how to apply the new rules. As a consequence, Finance Commissioner Philip R. Michael is not yet in a position to specify all the changes that will affect individual property owners.

GREENWICH MEMBERS of the Representative Town Meeting will convene here tomorrow knowing that the town's charter, at least as it is now written, prohibits one of their number, Leonard LaLuna, from being recognized. Like those of many other towns in the state, the Greenwich charter bars municipal employees from running for or holding public office. Mr. LaLuna, a 32-year-old firefighter and a Greenwich native, dealt with the first part of the charter's prohibition by running as a write-in candidate. But though the 76 votes he collected were enough to earn him a position on the town's 231-member legislative body, the Town Clerk, citing the charter prohibition, has refused to certify him. Mr. LaLuna's fight to take his seat, which began with a lawsuit filed in October, when he tried unsuccessfuly to win a place on the ballot, and amended in November, when his election was mathematically established, has stirred debate among many of the town's other elected officials about the propriety of the Greenwich charter. And the fight may have implications for municipal employees elsewhere in the state.

More than a third of the 42 hospitals in New York City seeking official designation to receive emergency ambulance patients have failed to meet qualifying standards. As a result, city officials said yesterday that they would modify or waive the standards rather than exclude any hospitals. To do otherwise, the officials said, would severely damage the city's five-year effort to establish a fully integrated emergency medical system. In addition, they said, it would negate the city's efforts to lower the response time of its emergency ambulances.

THE tone of last Monday's meeting of the Bo ard of Legislators was evident even before it was gaveled to order. The legislators were meeting at night, which they dislike doing, a nd only at the earlier insistence of Carl J. Calvi, a two-term Repub lican from Yonkers. He was in the Bahamas, however. His absence, and that of two other Republicans - the majority leader Edward J. Brady of Thorwood also was on vacation and John L. Messina of Port Chester has been ill since mid-October - was to prove more unsettling than the contentious mood, at least for the Republicans seeking to find a single referendum date for two important propositions facing the county. One deals with a proposed public utility agency that would be eligible for low-cost electricity and would presumably be able to distribute it through Consolidated Edison Company lines. The other issue is whether the county should establish a special taxing district to help pay for dumping fees at a proposed $180 million garbage-to-energy plant in Peekskill.

WARSAW IN a month in which the army and the security forces have ''pacified'' the country and the Solidarity union, the Polish Government ha s found itself back dancing a familiar two-step polonaise - a step to the left for Moscow and a step to the right forWashington. The martial law regime has sent out two smooth-talking, highly qualified emissaries. Jozef Czyrek, the Foreign Minister and a Politburo member, last week went to Moscow, where he presumably told the Kremlin that the threat of ''counterrevolution'' had been quashed and that what Poland needed more than anything was economic aid. Late last month, Deputy Prime Minister Mieczyslaw Rakowski, a one-time liberal whose power has risen considerably under martial law - he now is the principal civilian adviser to Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski and writes all the general's major speeches - was sent to Bonn, which Warsaw regards as the weak link in the Western alliance.

Governor Carey's announcement Friday that he would not seek a third term stunned the political community, yet was consistent with a career built on defying political wisdom to satisfy the priorities he saw. The political tenacity displayed by Mr. Carey has allowed him to build a hefty record of achievements in his seven years in office. But it is one that, he acknowledged, is seen less than brilliantly through the haze of offhand remarks and quirks of style that have plagued his tenure in Albany. This tenacity permitted him to achieve a widely hailed resolution of New York City's desperate fiscal problems shortly after he took office by forcing through a package of taxes over the vehement opposition of the Republican-led Senate. It allowed him to hold fast to his opposition to the death penalty, in the face of overwhelming public support for it, and to resist strenuous pressure from conservatives in the Legislature to end state financing of abortions for poor women.

KAFKA A Biography. By Ronald Hayman. Illustrated. 349 pp. New York: Oxford Univer sity Press. $19.95. LETTERS TO OTTLA AND THE FAMILY By Franz Kafka. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Edited by N.N. Glatzer. Illustrated. 130 pp. New York: Schocken Books. $15.95. IT is the work and not the life that matters, we dutifully remind ourselves whenever we settle in with another literary biography, succumbing to the lure of gossip in defiance of that high-minded axiom. The appeal of this genre, I suspect, is that it proposes to edify - the subject is literature, after all - yet indulges our uncurbable appetite for news about other peoples' lives. And once we've read the biography, it's a simple matter to convince ourselves that we haven't slighted the work; the biographer has merely supplied its context.