You Unwrap This Sugar Cube With The Key Of Imagination...

(Apologies to Rod Serling for that headline.) But of all the items currently trading on eBay, this one may be among the most random for local discussion. For just five bucks, you can buy an 80-year old sugar cube from long-ago Lynnfield restaurant Ship’s Haven – now known as The Ship.

If you decide to buy the sugar cube and consume it, please contact this website and your local paramedics in advance.

As a journalist with one eye always open for new story angles, I might have to be the one to buy it. I’ll crack it open one dark midnight – because I have a sneaking suspicion that if I do, a phantom waiter will appear and ask with perfect diction if I want one lump or two and then proceed to recommend the baked halibut. Whether I would then stick around for coffee sounds highly unlikely. But you never know. I like big band music an awful lot, and in my line of work I’ve had stranger days. 

The sugar cube also reminds me of that "Seinfeld" episode with the mistakenly-consumed cake slice from a 1930s royal wedding. 

That said – that’s a pretty nice level of detail on the wrapper itself, with the old Ship’s Haven logo. The wrapper mentions “Wilkinson’s Incorporated,” in reference to original “Ship” owner Ralph Wilkinson, who founded the ship-shaped Route 1 restaurant back in the late 1920s after retiring as a fisherman in Gloucester. The restaurant reopened earlier this year.