What was going on when I was born?

MOSCOW VIKTOR TIKHONOV is a man with an obsession born of loss. In barely six weeks the Soviet ice hockey team will play its first game in the XIV Olympic Winter Games at Sarajevo, Yugoslavia. Tikhonov, who was the coach of the team defeated by the United States in the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, is fine-tuning the squad he has molded to remove the solitary blot on an impeccable coaching career. If skill, experience and years of drilling were the only measures, Tikhonov could relax. His team may be the best the Soviet Union has ever assembled. But as Lake Placid showed, the elusive things that no amount of planning can pin down - the surging national pride that can spur an underdog, the sudden cohesion of untested players, luck at the goalmouth - can bring Olympic tournaments to improbable ends. The nightmare that Lake Placid could happen again, has been stalking the 53-year-old Tikhonov for nearly four years. Unlike coaches in other Soviet sports debacles, he and his assistant, Vladimir Yurzinov, have kept their jobs. The only shake-up since Lake Placid, the sacking of Boris Mayorov as head of the ice hockey federation this summer and his replacement by Anatoly Kostryukov, was prompted by an internal scandal at the federation that had nothing to do with the Olympic loss.

When the Federal Government phased out Ginnie Mae/Tandem financing for Section 8 housing rehabilitation projects two years ago, the remaining funds that had been authorized were allocated by lottery among qualified projects. One of the winners was a major renovation of a 24-unit dilapidated, fire-scarred apartment building in Mount Vernon, N.Y. The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently approved a $1.16 million Ginnie Mae/Tandem 40-year mortgage for the project, with 7.5 percent interest during construction and 11 percent for the remainder of the term, well below market rates.

Among the structures being transformed along Theater Row on West 42d Street are three adjoining low-rise tenements at the southwest corner of Ninth Avenue. Over the next few months, they will be turned into a 200-seat restaurant to be called Jolson's.

NEW state laws to protect children and their families, and new programs to prevent family crises, are expected to be in place with the New Year. ''The level of interest on the part of the administration and the Legislature on children's issues is unprecedented,'' said Alexandra Larson, executive director of the Governor's Committee on Children's Services Planning, an advisory body. ''It's an interest that's going across political parties and shows that people realize that New Jersey's children belong to all of us.'' Eight of 17 bills on children's issues recently passed the Senate or the Assembly; one of them - S. 3574, which removes the budget cap on family emergency funds used by the state's Division of Youth and Family Services - is awaiting Governor Kean's signature. It was sponsored by Senator Gerald R. Stockman, Democrat of Trenton.

Arafat DepartureCreates HopesAnd ProblemsYasir Arafat and 4,000 loyal Palestinians left Lebanon last week, but terrorism and other violence remained. The chairman of the much divided Palestine Liberation Organization went first to Egypt where, badly in need of Arab friends after being forced out of Tripoli, he embraced President Hosni Mubarak and so appeared to end the estrangement that began six years ago when Egypt made peace with Israel. Mr. Arafat had a long way to go from his reconciliation with the Egyptians to following their example, but the United States welcomed his gesture and called the meeting ''an encouraging development.'' The American reaction shocked the Israelis, who condemn Mr. Arafat as a terrorist. Disputing the view from Washington, Israel called Mr. Arafat's meeting with Mr. Mubarak ''a severe blow to the peace process.''

-STABILIZED tenants in New York City have been startled to discover lately that when they renew their leases, they are being asked to pay a special ''painting'' deposit against the cost of redecorating their apartments in the future. Many tenants have been calling upon specialists such as the staff at the Conciliation and Appeals Board, their own lawyers and even political representatives to find out if they have to pay it. These experts frequently give differing opinions, compounding the confusion. ''It's chaos,'' said Alexander B. Grannis, the Democratic Assemblyman from Manhattan's Upper East Side who is chairman of the Committee on Housing.

President Reagan says he believes there is a good chance of reviving his 15-month-old Middle East peace plan even before a settlement in Lebanon is achieved. In a year-end interview on Friday with news agency reporters, Mr. Rea Excerpts from interview, page 9. gan said he was ''leery about saying a breakthrough'' on his peace plan was imminent. But he said ''we are optimistic'' about the prospects for reviving the plan as a result of the split within the Palestine Liberation Organization and meeting Thursday between Yasir Arafat, the P.L.O. chairman, and President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt. In the last eight months, as Mr. Reagan noted, the United States has in effect shelved his peace initiative and concentrated instead on bringing about the withdrawal of Israeli and Syrian forces from Lebanon together with the United States Marines and other members of the international force.

- stabilized apartment at 965 Fifth Avenue for 18 years and hopes to live there for another 18, but he has run into a new kind of problem: After the building was converted into a cooperative last year, the buyer of his apartment tried to evict him, ostensibly on the ground that his 18-year-old washing machine is a violation of the lease. ''I appeal to you to end my harassment by my phantom landlord,'' the tenant recently wrote the Attorney General. If the owner - one of a new breed of landlords who own and rent out single apartments in co-op and condominium buildings - succeeds in evicting him, the one- bedroom apartment would no longer be regulated and could be rented for a much higher amount or sold for an impressive profit. In a Park Avenue cooperative not far away, the subtenant of an apartment owner refused to pay his monthly maintenance charges for more than a year, according to Douglas Elliman-Gibbons & Ives, the building's managing agent. The subtenant, the agent said, took advantage of the confused legal status of his landlord, who had filed for protection from creditors under the Federal bankruptcy laws in California. The co-op board had to hire a California lawyer to handle the case and the maintenance was not paid until the bankruptcy was resolved. Bitter struggles over New York City apartments are commonplace, but these situations involve a new, growing and relatively uncharted real-estate market. In both cases, the apartments were bought as investments rather than as residences by individuals, who then rented them and became absentee landlords.

BETHLEHEM MAYBE it is the towering spruce bedecked with lights each year, or the post office crowded with people using its special hand stamps on their Christmas mail. It could be the appealing tranquillity of the Benedictine Monastery on Flanders Road, with its elaborate cr eche displayed in an old stable, or the way the Village Green, lined with 18th- and 19th-century homes, looks when it is freshly blanketed with snow. For whatever reason, there is something special about living in Bethlehem at Christmas time, its residents agree. ''I used to be a regular Scrooge,'' said Thomas A. Brown, who moved here five years ago from Westfield, Mass., and serves as a town crier during the community's annual Christmas festival. ''But you can't help but get into the Christmas spirit here. It's all around you.''

The Internal Revenue Service has obtained a computerized mail-order list of the estimated incomes of two million American households and has begun to test whether it can help track down people who fail to pay their taxes. The service is conducting the test despite the refusal of the three major companies that develop such information to provide the Government with a list and over the objections of their trade organization, the Direct Marketing Association. Alexander Hoffman, who is the chairman of the board of the association and a group vice president at Doubleday & Company, said the sale of the list to the I.R.S. violated a provision in the group's code of ethics that lists should be rented only for marketing and could ''upset an important segment of the economy.'' The revenue service said a brokerage firm that provides marketing lists, the Dunhill Company of Washington, D.C., had put together the names the agency sought. The association said the company was not one of its member. Officials at the company did not return several telephone calls, but the revenue service spokesman said the names had been put together from several small concerns.

Seven years after his death, Mao Zedong is being extolled anew in films, newspaper and magazine articles and reminiscences by old comrades-in-arms. The fanfare introduces the 90th anniversary of Mao's birth on Dec. 26, 1893, but it seems to be selective. The tributes dwell upon his earlier contributions to the Communist cause and overlook later excesses that plunged China into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. There is no evidence that his radical policies, much less the personality cult that once propelled them, are being revived.

Bitter cold and high winds gripped the snow-dusted New York area on Christmas Eve, bringing thousands of complaints about heatless apartments and hampering last-minute shopping. The temperature during the day reached 22 degrees, and then in the afternoon it started to drop by a degree an hour. Weather forecasters expected temperatures early today to plummet to near zero in the city and even lower in the suburbs, contrasting with the balmy weather of last Christmas - 64 degrees, a record high for the day. 'It Will Feel Like 40 Below' Today's weather - with partly sunny skies and temperatures not above 15 degrees predicted - should be more in keeping with Christmas three years ago, when the mercury hit 1 degree below zero, a record low for the day.