The Window That Wouldn't Go Dark, Until This

I've been driving trucks for nineteen years, and in that time I've slept in more truck stop parking lots than I can count. You'd think by now I would have the sleep thing figured out. I hadn't, not until an amber security light bolted to a fuel island outside Amarillo decided it was going to shine straight into my sleeper cab window all night, every night, for a solid week while I ran the same lane.

I tried everything a stubborn man tries before he asks for help. I taped a flattened cardboard box over the glass with painter's tape, and it fell down around two in the morning every time the cab rocked from a passing rig. I jammed a bath towel into the window track, which blocked some light but let in a draft that had me shivering by sunrise. My factory curtain covered the middle of the window fine and left two bright strips down each side, right about where my eyes landed when I rolled over. None of it worked for more than a couple hours, and none of it was something I'd want my wife Denise dealing with if she ever rode along with me.

By the fourth night of maybe three hours of real sleep, I was calling Denise from the truck stop lot just to complain, which is not something I do often. She listened, laughed a little, and told me she had exactly the thing sitting in a closet at home. I didn't think much of it at the time. I figured a nursery shade was for a nursery, and my sleeper cab was about as far from a nursery as you could get.

Denise is the one who actually solved it, and she wasn't even trying to solve my problem. She'd bought a black suction cup blackout shade from DREAM ART for our youngest's nursery, the kind that presses right onto the glass instead of hanging from a rod. She had a second one left in the package and mailed it out to me at a terminal in Oklahoma City, mostly as a joke, telling me to quit complaining about the fuel island light. I figured it was worth ten minutes to try before my next run, so I peeled off the backing and pressed it against my sleeper window.

The DREAM ART shade measures fifty one inches by seventy one inches, which is nursery window sized, so it's bigger than a truck cab window by a good margin. I didn't cut it down. I just folded the extra material over at the top and let the suction cups grab wherever the glass sat flattest, four along the top edge and two more down each side. It took me about four minutes the first time and closer to ninety seconds every time since, because now I know exactly where the flat spots on my window are. The black side blocks the light, and there's no cardboard, no tape residue, no towel smell hanging around the cab.

That first morning I woke up because my alarm went off, not because the sun found a way in. I hadn't had that happen in years.

That was eight months ago, and the shade has ridden with me through a Texas summer and most of a winter run up toward Minnesota. It's held up better than I expected from something built for a kid's room. The suction cups are the one part I keep an eye on. In real heat, when the glass gets hot enough that I don't want to touch it bare handed, one or two cups will let go by afternoon and I have to press them back on before I climb in for the night. That's not a deal breaker, it's a thirty second fix, but it's the honest truth and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

What matters more is what happens after the cups are set. Once it's up, it stays dark. Not dim, dark. I've slept through a truck stop that lit up like a ballfield at 3 a.m. because somebody's reefer unit tripped an alarm, and I only knew about it because a buddy mentioned it the next morning. Denise still has the original one up in our youngest's window at home, and between the two of us we've probably got closer to a year and a half of combined use out of this exact shade, which is more testing than I trust most reviews to have behind them.

I've also started keeping a folded second one in the truck, rolled up behind the seat, because the first thing I do at a new stop now is check which side of the cab is going to catch the light and put it up before I even eat dinner. It sounds like a small habit, but it's saved me more bad nights than any pillow or app I've ever tried.

I've written up the longer version of how it's held up mile after mile in my long term review of the DREAM ART shade, and if you want every wart and complaint laid out plain, I put that in my honest review too. I'm not going to repeat all of it here. This is just the story of how one showed up in my life and why I haven't taken it down since.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

If you asked me over coffee, I'd tell you it's not fancy and it's not going to fix a bad mattress or a noisy neighbor. What it does is block light, completely, for well under thirty dollars, and it does that job in a cab window it was never designed for just as well as it does in a nursery. I'd tell you to press the cups down hard before you trust them on a hot day, and I'd tell you that after eight months I still reach for it before anything else in my bag when I roll into a truck stop with too many lights on.