JUST WHEN I think I'm making useful progress back to the 19th century - wood fires, ballots with penciled "X" marks, sane cows - along comes something to wrench me into the 21st. Somehow, I now possess a cellphone.

Or rather, I am possessed by a cellphone. There are few things in the world more disheartening than feeling intellectually inferior to a gadget that is two inches shorter than one's average manhood and speaks in a monotone not unlike Al Gore.

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I conduct running warfare with modern gimmicks. Vacuum tube radios brought me "Inner Sanctum" and "Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy," which I can't seem to get on the new push-button jobbies.

My old Thunderbird convertible used to get eight miles to the gallon, but it also cost about $18,000 less than a modern Ford. The black and white TV I got from Sears for 100 bucks gave me "Sergeant Bilko" and "I Love Lucy," but what I get on my overpriced color tube is Letterman, Leno and the dreadawful "Friends."

In short, I am quite comfortable living in the past, the closer to the days of William McKinley (before he got shot), the better. It is this desire for an existence owing more to cobblestone back roads than the international superhighway that is largely why my wife Elizabeth and I have opted for the village life.

Paradoxically, this going back in time, to a world of cottage and wood fires in an open hearth and gaslight when the farmer in the next field knocks down the power pole, that accounts for my ownership of a cellphone.

Elizabeth gave it to me. In her view, country life is fraught enough with marauding foxes and battles over who gets the parking spaces down Mill Lane and no major department store within eight miles without having to be out of communication with the rest of the known universe when the above-mentioned farmer plows up the phone cable.

She bought these two cellphones (hers is silver, mine is green) so we can keep in touch with each other and with the outside world at all times. Which makes good sense - time-warping is fine, but it's best to have a way of keeping in at least occasional touch with the 21st century, if only to find out if America ever got a new president.

(Also it keeps her mind off chickens. Elizabeth has this great vision of having three of the wretched creatures in our back garden, keeping us provided with raw materials for omelets. She has spurned my notion that we also have the raw materials for three hearty dinners of roast chicken.)

Anyway, I have this little cellphone, which seems capable of everything from advanced calculus to summoning a meeting of Congress on the planet Zog and, for all I know, roasting a chicken for dinner.

After three days, I have mastered the art of making a telephone call. Elizabeth, who takes to phones of any kind like Hannibal Lecter takes to dining companions, has promised me a diploma in advanced technology.

Cellphones, mind you, are not as easy as the thingies linked to cables by cords that get tangled up in Gordian knots. First, there is the matter of size. With my cellphone, either you hold it to your ear and speak into open space, or you hold it to your mouth to speak, which seems to mean listening through your upper molars.

That does take a bit of getting used to. Far more esoteric - which is to say, nearly bloody impossible - is programming phone numbers into it. This is a practice that demands the patience of a Palm Beach ballot counter, the dexterity of a cardsharp and use of the family electron microscope.

My first effort was to program in the phone number at Chard Cottage. This involves using the number buttons to write names. The problem is, there are 10 numbers but 26 letters in the alphabet. Actually, it's simple, if you are at all conversant with binomial theorem, Riemannian geometry and egg prices in China.

When I tried tapping in C-H-A-R-D, what I got was A-G-a-P-d. When I went to add the cottage's 11-digit number, the cellphone decided six digits were enough and quit accepting any more.

Detecting that I was on the verge of going for the Guinness Book of Records entry for cellphone distance-throwing through television sets, Elizabeth snatched it from my hand and allowed as how she would take over getting phone numbers into what she called the "directory" and all I had to do was push the appropriate buttons.

Making a call, it turns out, involves calling up "directory," then punching "OK," then clicking on "alpha sort" (don't ask), then "OK" again, then the first letter of the party's name I wish to call. I should have this down pat in time to call a taxi to get us home from the New Year's party.

In this learning process, I have discovered that 1. people can actually type out text messages on this sort of phone, and 2. they use a use a form of shorthand that saves on having to write tons of letters and risk going blind in the process.

For instance, "RUOK?" means - surprise - "Are you okay?" How about "IL B L8" ("I'll be late")? You can even get a dictionary dedicated to such cellphone messaging - the SMS DXNRE (the latter, of course, "dictionary," or an approximation thereof).

But we can turn back the pages of time on this one - to 50 and more years ago, when news agencies, to save money on cable messages that were charged by the word, used a form of shorthand called cablese (cable-ese). This involved combining two or more words into one, such as "unsend" (don't send) or "Chicagoward" (to Chicago).

Cablese reached its zenith in United Press International, the news agency I worked for. A frustrated stringer somewhere in the remote Pacific at last got fed up and cabled New York: "Life too short hours too long pay too low stop upstick job assward."

That's the magic of good communications - being precise and concise.

Thought for the Week: Don't have your tongue pierced because it hurts when you say "sausages."

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