Ein Mal!

“Ein mal!”, he screamed at the group of us. “Ein mal!”

It’s taken five years of living here in Switzerland for me to figure out what ‘ein mal’ means. The butcher has posed the term in question form, ‘ein mal?’ and I didn’t get it. I’ve heard ballet teachers say it to my little girls during class, but it always passed over my head. I never bothered to figure out the meaning of the phrase.

This morning I took an exercise class at the gym. I’d made it almost forty years without taking a single exercise class (through the Jazzercise craze, even) and thought I could make it a lifelong commitment (or phobia), but caved when I realized how trim the ladies were who take this class.

It is a trampoline class. Control your laughter. When I first heard about a class, lead by a man, that has women jumping up and down on trampolines for forty minutes I thought it was a joke, too. ’This guy gets paid to watch women jumping in spandex?’. But truth be told it is a great workout. And the teacher, Fabian is a really good motivator, does the entire workout with all of us and is never, ever slimy.

So today, as we were finishing off a set of jump and squats (that were killing me), Fabian yelled, “Ein mal!” and I finally got it, ‘ein mal’ is Swiss German for ’one more’, as in, ‘just one more‘.

At that moment, ‘ein mal’ were the two sweetest words I had ever heard.