I am loath to admit this, because I would love to say I’m a really observant guy, a person who notices the small things around him.

It would fit perfectly well with my chosen profession, where “seeing and remembering as events unfold” is a particularly useful job skill. But it also seems as if “knowing what you saw” would be the sort of ability that anyone with pretensions to intelligence would be good at, too.

How good an eyewitness would you be if you were asked what you saw right around your front door the last time you walked outside?

Today, the sixth day since returning to Abu Dhabi, I looked across the parking lot from the teeny apartment, at the house across the way … and something seemed a bit different.

I looked at it more, and more … and on about my sixth look at the house — on my sixth day back in the country, remember — it struck me that the entire side of the house had been changed.

What had been a scraggly mess, with a sprawling but nearly dead tree, a batch of weeds and  some sickly bushes, had been completely removed. All that crappy underbrush and the saggy tree that shed weird little husks … were gone. Replaced by a half-dozen healthy young junipers,  carefully spaced and planted, and a stone fence that had either been 1) repainted, 2) cleaned or 3) replaced.

I’m such a bad observer of every day life that I’m not entirely sure about the wall. I have a recollection that a cracking and decrepit door had been in that wall, and now it has a nice new door. But maybe the door had just been hidden behind the weeds and ugly bushes and shabby tree?

You’ve seen those TV crime shows, yes, where the plot pivots on an eyewitness getting things wrong, and cops and investigators saying “the eyewitness is notoriously unreliable.”

Well, I liked to think that wouldn’t be me.

And then they do occasional tests in college classrooms, having a couple of distinctive people in distinctive clothes come in and do something startling, and within minutes the professor immediately tests the students on what they thought they saw, and they’re mostly wrong and often all over the place with the most basic details.

I was sure that wouldn’t be me. I would ace the “surprise eyewitness” test. I was pretty sure of. “The second man came from the right. He was about 6-foot-2, maybe 250, chubby guy, and he had on a red shirt and he jumped over the wall and ran away.” Sure. Chapter and verse.

Now that I’m in confession mode, however, I concede I’ve known for a while I’m a shaky eyewitness. I know it from my job.

In sports, major plays happen in a few seconds. In some sports, 10, 15, 20 people are running around all at once, and to be able to describe what happened — and be sure you’re right … just doesn’t happen. Ask 10 sports writers to tell you what happened on a big play that just unfolded right in front of them, and you might not find a majority correctly picking the guy who just scored, never mind the defender he beat or the teammate who made the key block, or what formation they had been in when the play began or what pass route the receiver ran.

So, yes. I’m a bad eyewitness. In the professional world (especially in soccer and hockey), I am dead without TV replay. I sometimes think that any football game story you read from the pre-instant replay era … don’t believe any of the details on any play. Not many of us are really that good. (High school football really hammered this home; half the time I would be chasing around the participants, after the game, asking them “what happened on the game’s biggest play?”)

In everyday life … they could start building the Trump Towers down the street from me and it might take me a month to notice that, “Hey, a lot of construction vehicles seem to be in the neighborhood.” I wish it weren’t so.