What was going on when I was born?

The letter began ''Comrade Secretary'' and it got right to the point. ''I hereby return my party card,'' wrote Tadeusz Lomnicki, one of Poland's foremost actors, who for 30 years had been a member of the Polish Communist Party, rising in 1975 to membership in the Central Committee. ''This must be a shock to it - I cannot deny that - but I cannot do anything else. '' The letter was a cry of conscience. Mr. Lomnicki described his years in the party, his belief in the ideals of Communism and justice that he clung to through the years of Stalinism, the hopes aroused by the 1956 rise of Wladyslaw Gomulka, the ''betrayal'' of that hope in Mr. Gomulka's later years, the anti-intellectual purges of 1968, the stagnating 1970's. Then came Solidarity, and Mr. Lomnicki's faith in a ''chance for socialism in Poland'' was renewed.

Under skies of oyster gray that wept snow, sleet and rain on the whole of a dull and dreary January day, the New York metropolitan area was the scene yesterday of swirling mists and solitary strollers, of churning slush and curbside lakes and of icy roads and flooded, nearly deserted streets. Despite the soggy mess, there was a wild beauty in the city and suburban landscapes: The brush strokes of an Oriental painting lay in the mists of Central Park, with stark leafless trees in the foreground fading into ranks of fainter images, of park benches and hillocks wreathed in fog and, faraway, the shrouded facades of Manhattan's skyscrapers. It was worse elsewhere in the nation. Blizzards howled again over the Middle West, burying Minnesota's Twin Cities with 19.9 inches of new snow. Avalanches left 3,000 skiers snowbound but unhurt at a Utah resort, and freezing rain and snow snarled traffic and the travel plans of many bound for today's Super Bowl XVI in Pontiac, Mich. (Page 33.)

The Defense Department has given lie-detector tests to about 25 senior officials in an unsuccessful effort to find the source of an unauthorized disclosure of confidential information, according to Pentagon officials. The lie-detector, or polygraph, tests were begun by Deputy Secretary of Defense Frank C. Carlucci, who took the first one himself. They were given to Under Secretaries Fred C. Ikle and Richard D. De lauer; Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman and other military serv ice secretaries; the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. D avid C. Jones; other four-star generals and admirals, and several A ssistant Secretaries of Defense and their aides. The tests and other inquiries, however, have not uncovered the official or officials who gave the press an account of a policy debate in a high-level meeting at the Pentagon earlier this month. Officially, the investigation continues, but Pentagon officials said they had little hope of discovering the source of the information.

WHEN central heating first came along toward the end of the 19th century, it seemed that living patterns would never be quite the same. Instead of huddling around an open hearth, keeping doors tightly shut between rooms or even going to bed with a nightcap (the knitted kind, of course), people reveled in a newfound freedom. Even in the depths of winter they were able to move around their houses without shivering. Architects seized upon the opportunity to develop open-living plans that eventually became synonymous with the American home of the 20th century. Not necessarily so anymore. The 80's are beginning to see a return to the huddling concepts of past centuries. Consider, for instance, what some homeowners are doing for thrifty winter warmth these days: For most of the 18 years that Virginia and Alfred Wage have lived in their spacious, four-bedroom colonial-style home in Fairfield, heating was never a problem. But lately oil bills had become excessive, especially so, it seemed, since many of the rooms were rarely used now. Their three children were grown and Mrs. Wage was working full time as a nurse.

SECOND semester will dawn tomorrow at the University of Connecticut in Storrs with some budget cuts just completed and further financial wrangling with the General Assembly looming next month. Trustees and administrators of the university raised student fees, halted book purchases for the college library and announced plans to cut 220 positions while the 20,000 students were on Christmas vacation. The actions followed approval of a $50 annual increase in tuition and the elimination of 226 positions earlier in 1981. Additional cutbacks may be necessary after the General Assembly, still trying to eliminate an $83 million state deficit, considers UConn's request for $85.6 million in state aid for the 1982-83 academic year. The request is to come up early in the legislature's regular session, which begins next month. UConn raises $85 million more from tuition, grants and other sources.

Who owns New York? There was little doubt among the hockey fans at Nassau Coliseum tonight as the Islanders routed the Rangers, 6-1, with a four-goal second period and took sole posession of first place in the Patrick Division. The Islanders moved a point ahead of the Ph iladelphia Flyers, who tied tonight with the Pittsburgh Penguins, an d 12 ahead of the Rangers. The Rangers and the Penguins are tie d for third place in thestanding. By avenging the 3-2 defeat inflicted on them by the Rangers Wednesday, the Islanders took a 28-27 edge in their career series and a 4-2 edge in the first six of eight games this season. The Islanders' victory also ended the unbeaten streak of Ed Mio as a Ranger goaltender.

SURF CITY THE traffic lights on Ocean Boulevard, the main thoroughfare of this Long Beach Island resort community, have been turned off. Most of the shops are closed and, near the beach, only the sound of the wind blowing against empty bungalows competes with the rhythmic pounding of the surf. But despite the almost deserted streets, life goes on. The nearly 1,800 residents - most of them elderly - find the quiet and beauty of the sea in winter preferable to the hectic pace of summer, when vacationers litter the beaches, tie up traffic and crowd the local stores.

HARTFORD THE House a nd Senate had met late into the night, hoping to finish the business of a special session. But instead, they got into a disagreement over budget cuts that made it all but certain that they would be in H artford at least another week. The next morning, while legislators tried to figure out how they would reconcile the last day's work of the two houses, Lieut. Gov. Joseph J. Fauliso, filling in for the Governor in ceremonial duties at the Capitol, was welcoming a group of Danish visitors to the building. Connecticut, he told them, was the greatest state in the union, and one of its strong points was the stability of its government.

PIECE by piece and week by week, the county assembles its ambitious plan to convert the household garbage of 35 communities into energy, even as the Board of Legislators continues to argue over the date for a referendum that would establish a major fiscal component of that plan. Last week, in a signing ceremony heavy with corporate leadership, the Consolidated Edison Company agreed to buy all the electric power generated by the 55-megawatt garbage-to-energy plant that Wheelabrator-Frye Inc. of Hampton, N.H., plans to complete in Peekskill by 1985. It was the first such commitment by the uti lity, although it is obliged under Federal law to buy the power, a nd Arthur Hauspurg, Con Edison's president and chief executive office r, indicated that he wasdelighted to help the county solve its refuse problem while finding asubstitute for imported oil. Con Edison will pay the garbage plant the same amount that it would have to pay if it generated the power itself or bought it elsewhere, and at the rate of the highest cost of energy at the time. If that means foreign oil, as company officials indicated, it should produce revenues of $20 million a year to the county, and reduce the taxes that Westchester will be raising to help pay for the cost of dumping.

WITNESS TO POWER The Nixon Years. By John Ehrlichman. Illustrated. 432 pp. New York: Simon & Schuster. $17.50. By ROBERT SHERRILL ''WITNESS TO POWER'' is to your ordinary history as kung fu is to calisthenics. These memoirs of John Ehrlichman, once counsel and domestic affairs adviser to Richard Nixon, are unfair, bitchy, spiteful, gossipy, distorted, self-serving - and eminently entertaining. Mr. Ehrlichman's recent experience as a novelist serves him well. He has become such a swell storyteller that one almost forgets what this clever rascal is really up to. His stretch in prison and the wringer of public opinion apparently have squeezed out some of the qualities that prompted Bob Woodward and Carl Bern stein to describe him as ''a snarling prune.'' Now he issmooth. With seeming modesty this born-again cynic encourages us to believe that there never was a John Ehrlichman who made White House underlings af raid. ''Bob Haldeman, as White House Chief of Staff, became the ma n in the White House closest to the President,'' he writes, ''and I, by virtue of a curious confusion, was also reputed to have a maj or influence.'' Just reputed, you understand. We are supposed to t ake our guidance from the title of the book - not ''exploiter'' of power or even ''sharer'' of power, nothing so activeas that, but merely ''witness'' to power.

Composers nowadays are a generally sane and domesticated lot. With few exceptions, the faces they present to the public are interchangeable with those of middle-level insurance executives or computer software salesmen. Why so? It cannot be only that composers have allied themselves so intimately with the business and academic worlds, through foundation commissions and faculty employment, that they think it wise to dress their minds and bodies in institutional gray. Something deeper is involved, something that separates the respected composer of our time from the more raffish and more colorful types who preceded him in history: our composers for the most part have never shown any desire to become celebrated public performers and do not have the virtuoso's volatile temperament. What would we say today if we picked up the newspaper and discovered that Modern Composer X, a tenured professor at Ivyclad University, had gone mad with the fear of oncoming mediocrity and thrown himself in the river, like Schumann? What if Com poser Y, who has commissions lined up through 1995, wereto let it be bruited about that he had signed a pact with the devil, like Paganini ?

France signed a major natural gas contract with the Soviet Union today despite objections by the Reagan Administration. The United States, which fears that the deal will make Western Europe too dependent on Soviet energy, is already trying to delay construction of a 2,800-mile pipeline that would carry the Soviet gas down from western Siberia into France, West Germany, Italy and other Western European countries. After the military crackdown in Poland began, Washington refused permission to the General Electric Company to export crucial parts for the huge turbine-powered compressor stations needed to pump the gas along. Today's agreement provides for France to purchase about 280 billion cubic feet of Siberian natural gas a year for 25 years, with deliveries starting in 1984.