I once wrote a poem in the voice of an old man who gives bad directions in downtown San Antonio. On purpose, that is. I imagined him sitting in front of a stand of prickly pear cactus along what used to be Durango Boulevard (now Cesar E. Chavez Boulevard), wearily looking up as a carload of tourists asked directions to the Alamo. In the poem, the man spontaneously, and a little naughtily, steers them on toward a few things he considers more worth their time.

Of course the “man” in the poem is a thinly veiled version of me, and of course you should go see the mythic site of that battle between Mexican troops and Texan volunteer soldiers. It surprises many by being smaller than they expect, smack in the middle of downtown, and right across the street from the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Odditorium. Whether our town’s most famous silhouette best symbolizes resilient heroism or the eventual conquest of valuable real estate is beyond the scope of this discussion. That too depends on whom you ask.

What I can promise is that everything you’ve heard about San Antonio is probably true, and that none of it is. The nation’s seventh-most populous city often behaves like a very small town. We’re rumored by national concert promoters to love our heavy metal, but klezmer- and conjunto-loving crowds pack the International Accordion Festival held each September, downtown in the historic art community La Villita. We’re politically and socially conservative, but a New York Times profile of wildly popular mayor Julián Castro went so far as to call us “a kind of Berkeley of the Southwest.” Okay, so maybe that one is a bit of a stretch, but you saw Castro give the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, right? (Then again, that could have been his identical twin brother, Joaquin, currently serving his first term in the U.S. House of Representatives.) The mayor’s on Facebook, too, and a few days after posting a link to yet another recent article touting San Antonio as a hip and happening city, he posted a classic Tex-Mex still life taken on his own kitchen counter. There’s a flour tortilla warming on the stove, a container of barbacoa, a bottle of Big Red soda, an avocado, and a packet of chamoy, that weirdly addictive Mexican condiment made of chile, lime, and pickled fruit. The caption reads, “We’ve got it all this morning.”

So which San Antonio is it? The next big thing, or the same old breakfast tacos? I’d say that it’s both, and that this sometimes idiosyncratic combination of tradition, innovation, stubbornness, and charm, along with a particular mix of Western, Mexican, and Southern flavors, is what makes San Antonio so sweet, as well as surprising. Count me among the surprised, to have stayed, I mean. I learned to walk here, literally, in 1972, when my dad was stationed at Fort Sam Houston. Most of the base’s gates closed after 9/11, but you can still enter on foot at Grayson Street, and from there reach even further back in time inside the old 1876 Quadrangle. Bring the kids and a bag of carrots to feed the peacocks, geese, and deer that roam free inside the thick stone walls. You can even tell them the story about how Geronimo was once held captive here, but I don’t know if that’s really true either.

Our family eventually moved on, and when I returned twenty-some years later for a one-year teaching position, I assumed it would again be a temporary stay. I imagined I would eventually move north, eighty miles up I-35 to be exact, to Austin. Because if you had to live in Texas, you lived there, right? I never made it to Austin. I liked visiting, but it made me kind of tired to be so aware of how excited I should be to be there. San Antonio was sleepier, less shiny, and less self-conscious about its image. As Graham Greene once wrote, “You have the sensation in San Antonio by day of the world’s being deliciously excluded.” There were also fewer ironic mustaches.