Collective kindness inspires daughter’s road trip and book

Mary Latham comes from the hamlet of Orient Point, Long Island, N.Y., a tiny, close-knit community where there were 12 students in her elementary school class and she drove herself to their sixth-grade graduation on the family lawnmower.

So she could understand why, even after she turned 29 and was living in Manhattan, her dad got stressed when she announced her intention to drive alone through every state in the contiguous U.S. in Old Blue, her late mother’s 2008 Subaru Outback, staying with strangers and relying solely on voluntary contributions to pay for food and gas.

But James Latham couldn’t argue with the goal of his daughter’s trip — to honor her mother Patricia Latham’s belief that, while there would inevitably be tragedies in life, “there would always be more good out there if we looked for it,” Latham said at a Honolulu press conference on Wednesday.

She also promised to call home every night.

While she started out collecting acts of kindness through social media and her website, she wanted to spend real, old-fashioned face time hearing stories, Latham said, having arrived in Hawaii, her final stop, three years and 42,000 miles later, after spending the night in her 152nd strangers’ home.

“Instead of reading their story in an email, today I was sitting in Honolulu with this family,” Latham said of Sejal Bella, who started the Mali Bella Foundation to connect bereaved parents after an infant daughter died in an accident, her 10-year-old daughter who has raised $10,000 to help save elephants, and her 5-year-old son who said that love is the best advice he’s received from life.

She also met with Rich Julian, paralyzed in a car accident at age 14, who went on to co-found AccesSurf, which lets people with disabilities enjoy the waves.

Latham has also discovered that small acts of kindness can have a lasting positive impact.

They include a bag of M&Ms a bank customer bought and slipped into a teller’s window after asking her why she looked so sad that day, the teller told Latham 30 years later.

And a Starbucks coffee that a stranger bought for one of Latham’s co-workers who’d had a hard year. “He was glowing,” Latham said.

That morning was Dec. 14, 2012, and the television news was covering the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. Latham, badly shaken, called her mother.

“‘Mom, there’s so much bad out there,’ I said. And she said, ‘Focus on that coffee story.’ She was battling her second round of cancer.”

After her mother’s surgery, Latham spent four days in a hospital waiting room with nothing to read. She resolved to collect and compile a book of acts of kindness and donate it to hospitals to “put a little hope back in those rooms.”

In a recent act of kindness, auto dealer Servco contacted Latham before she flew to Hawaii and offered to lend her a Subaru to drive on each island. She accepted.

Wearing cutoffs and her signature “More Good” T-shirt, Latham thanked the employees of Servco, which hosted the news conference, and answered their questions.

What had she learned on her trip?

“What it all boils down to: Kindness is giving time.”

Her biggest surprise?

“That I did it,” Latham said.

Another surprise, she added, was that, while she’d set out “to prove what my mom said, I didn’t really believe it.”

Now she’s proved it to herself, she said.

And she called her dad every night.