What was going on when I was born?

It wasn't so long ago that the idea of disposable buildings seemed nearly as acceptable in America as disposable cigarette lighters. Today, however, the movement to preserve old structures and land has taken hold, and the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation believes it is time for a caucus of all the groups of preservationminded people across the Nutmeg State who have been working to save notable structures. A meeting has been scheduled for next Saturday at the Yale University School of Law in New Haven at which representatives of 25 local groups are expected to gather.

METROPOL Literary Almanac. Edited by Vasily Aksyonov, Viktor Yerofeyev, Fazil Iskander, Andrei Bitov and Yevgeny Popov. Foreword by Kevin Klose. Illustrated. 643 pp. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. $24.95. EVERYTHING about this anthology is remarkable: its inception, its fortunes, its contents. ''Metropol'' was first published in 1979 in the original Russian version by Ardis in Michigan and in a French translation by Gallimard in Paris. Its history has been told by Vasily Aksyonov, its instigator and prime mover, by Kevin Klose, a former Moscow correspondent for The Washington Post, in his foreword to the English translation, and in samizdat publications that have been reprinted in The Chronicle of Current Events, published in Russian in New York. This history is an amusing, bracing, tragic, heroic one, and ''fantastic,'' one would like to add, were it not that fantasy implies the unusual, whereas the events in this case are of a type all too commonplace in the Soviet Union.

INTEREST rates have stabilized in the past few months, but t here are faint signs that the rates may be starting to creep up a gain. The change is not dramatic, and many lenders continue to offer their lowest rate in nearly two years. But a few banks, savings and loans and mortgage companies have recently raised their rates by a half a percentage point on conventional fixed-rate loans. Dime Savings Banks of New York, for example, has raised its rate on a 30-year conventional loan from 13 to 13.5 percent.

The confidence of the Knicks in their ability to apply defensive pressure has grown so strong recently that little appears to faze them, not a 12-point deficit nor a 1-for-10 shooting performance in the first five minutes of a game. The Knicks overcame both of those handicaps last night and defeated the Chicago Bulls, 94-79, at Madison Square Garden. It was the Knicks' fourth consecutive victory and their 14th in the last 17 games, a streak that began with a victory over the Denver Nuggets on Jan. 22. The record of the Knicks is now 27-28.

Herschel Walker went to work today. The all-America tailback and Heisman Trophy winner from the University of Georgia reported to the training camp here of the New Jersey Generals of the United States Football League and after a half-hour news conference Walker put on a white uniform with the No. 34 on the jersey. Then he went to the practice field with 50 new teammates and began learning how the Generals play this game. One thing that the Generals want to learn is how well Walker, a record-breaking running back in college, can catch passes. In his first practice, he spent much of his time in passing drills.

When a group of Italian investors decided to renovate the six-story building at 56 Beaver Street in Manhattan, built by the Delmonico brothers in the 1830's to house their famous restaurant, the intention was to create 39 luxury condominiums. But by the time the $6 million renovation was complete last fall, the residential condominium market had become soft.

On the face of it, ''How big is an exhibition?'' is one of the dumber questions. Like ''How wet is water?'' and ''How wide is Wednesday?'' It cannot be answered. It does mean something, though. There are times and places in which an exhibition cannot be too big. In 1980 the Picasso exhibition filled every known corner of the Museum of Modern Art. But it ran out of space, not out of energy. Besides, it was held at exactly the right time. Not only was a mass of new Picasso material coming into view, but the exhibition was the ideal end to the lifespan of the museum's old building. When the Council of Europe organized a long series of mammoth historical exhibitions in the 1950's and 60's, we were never exhausted, any more than the subjects were exhausted. In every case, moreover, the place was right, just as the subject was right. ''The Age of Charlemagne'' looked terrific in Charlemagne's old city of Aachen. ''The Age of Rococo'' in Munich was an ideal match for the surviving monuments of the rococo era in that much battered city. That ''The Romantic Movement'' should be held in London seemed predestined to the fellow countrymen of Byron, Walter Scott and J.M.W. Turner.

GOVERNOR KEAN, who admittedly attracted some criticism for affixing his name to a State Republican Committee fund raising letter seeking $1,000-a-year donors, has mailed another letter, this time seeking $3 million for a pet project of his in the state government. Mr. Kean has enlisted the support of New Jersey's large corporations in a study of state departments, with an eye toward streamlining their operations and saving money. Some changes already made have enabled the administration to claim several millions of dollars in cost-cutting. The Governor, in offering a balanced budget for the 1984 fiscal year that begins July 1, requires 17 of the 20 state government departments to operate with the same amount of money they received this year. This means the departments must ''eat'' inflation costs and employee raises.

After seven flush years - financially, if not esthetically - Broadway is at least temporarily in trouble. The current season is playing to far fewer customers than it did last year, at the moment of writing at least 15 theaters are dark, etcetera, etcetera. You've read the papers. And, no doubt, you've shrugged and wondered what else anyone could possibly expect, considering the current state of the economy. I'm not at all sure the economy has that much to do with it. It's more or less the same crummy economy we had last year, when Broadway was still breaking box office records, and if ticket prices have been nudged upwards we've got to remember that (a) Broadway was very slow to start the nudging, and (b) the cost of a theater seat hasn't yet come anywhere near matching the overall rate of inflation. That last thought (b) is horrifying, and I'm sorry I brought it up.

President Reagan last week urged Israel to accept American security guarantees on its northern borders and withdraw from Lebanon, but the Israelis stood their ground in more ways than one. White House officials said one option could be to expand the fournation, 4,400-man force and put it on guard in southern Lebanon. But Israel has never been willing to entrust its security to others, as Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir noted. ''We are not asking now for American guarantees,'' he said, because Lebanon and Israel were ''the only parties who have the motivation'' to root out terrorists. American guarantees would be welcome, Israeli officials added, ''on top of a good agreement with Lebanon.'' With that reaction, Mr. Reagan played down his offer as ''not anything new.''

THE county chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union is coordinating the preparation of plan that, if accepted, will allow an Immigration Court to be established in Westchester to hear the deportation cases of Haitian refugees living in the county. There are believed to be 22 Haitian refugees in the county, placed here under the sponsorship of various church groups. Their arrival followed an order issued last June in Miami by Federal District Judge Eugene P. Spellman, which freed some 2,000 Haitian refugees, the socalled boat people, from detention centers nationwide. The lawyers are part of what has been described by legal specialists as probably the largest pro bono publico program ever undertaken in the United States. The legal effort, which was specified in Judge Spellman's order to insure the refugees' representation, is being undertaken by four organizations - the Lawyers' Committee for International Human Rights, the American Bar Association, the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the Dade County Bar Association. In Westchester, it is being coordinated by the county chapter of the Civil Liberties Union in conjunction with the Manhattan-based Lawyers Committee and the Community Law Offices of the Legal Aid Society, which head the project in the New York City area.

President Reagan said today that he would ask Congress to end price controls on natural gas over the next three years. He emphasized that in that period the Government would prevent industry from passing higher costs to consumers. ''As the situation stands now, the American consumer is being hurt by Government regulations that actually contribute to higher gas bills,'' Mr. Reagan said in announcing the decontrol plan in his weekly radio address. Some Democratic members of Congress and consumer groups immediately criticized the plan, saying it would mean higher natural gas prices.