I know that - that is my writing style. ;)
Just add a few descriptive adjectives. "My Grandfather with the frosty white hair and gnarled hands . . ."
Oh, and as I recall, there's a Military section in Readers' Digest.
I loved your story, patton-you really should try to get it published.
Someday, I hope to write a novel about this rural Peyton Place we live in-I will call it "The Winter People", which is what we all jokingly call ourselves (permanent residents as opposed to the "summer people" and "townies" who leave at the end of summer). I've written short stories and poetry for magazines in the past, but never a novel-I haven't written anything for anyone but myself for years, though I already have a partial outline of the thing-I want it to be more like stories about individual characters and their relationships, strung together by a common thread of living in the same small community, rather than a central story and plot with character interactions as an aside. Might not work for me, but it did work in "Peyton Place", "Parrish" and several other novels about rural goings-on...