LONDON—Two Saturdays ago, I crossed Abbey Road. The camera caught me mid-stride, as it did the Fab Four more than 30 years ago in the famous photograph that would grace the cover of the last album the Beatles ever recorded.

We’ve all seen the picture. John leads the way, dressed all in white. Ringo follows in a black mod suit. Paul is next, barefoot, cigarette in hand. George brings up the rear, clad head to toe in blue denim. With a green marker I carefully tagged the stone pillar next to the Westminster NW8 street sign and the wall in front of Abbey Road Studios across the street, adding my name and the date to all the other testimonials of adoration—some quoting favorite lyrics, some merely proclaiming, “I was here,” some wishing John still was.

As I finished studying the signatures and walked past an emptying synagogue (Ringo’s shul, I joked) on the road back to the Tube station, I began to sense that what the great Rav Abraham Isaac Kook said of the Western Wall was also true of the world’s best-loved crosswalk: There are men with hearts of stone, and there are stones with hearts of men.

And yet I felt just as acutely the transience and triviality of the whole exercise. The wall in front of the Abbey Road Studios next door, regularly repainted to accommodate a planet’s worth of pilgrims seeking a cheap thrill, bore only signatures dating back a few days. My name would be gone in the blink of an eye.

The next day—Sunday—Reuters reported that George Harrison was dying of a brain tumor. The tabloids had said it many times before, and George had denied it, but this was Reuters. Thinking only of how Freddie Mercury finally admitted he had AIDS the day before he died, I was convinced that the quiet Beatle had one foot in the grave. He had dodged throat cancer and a lunatic’s knife, but at 58, he had finally lost his battle with cancer.

Monday: a worried man with a worried mind rides a double-decker bus through the English countryside. And then word comes from the Associated Press: George and his wife deny the rumors once again. Though ostensibly as haggard and thin as ever, George is reputedly healthy and active. Tuesday: my plane touches down at Logan Airport. Wednesday: back to work. The roller coaster comes to a stop—or does it?

George has been at times a difficult man to root for. Had it not been for Yoko, the Beatles’ breakup might well have been pinned on George's increasing assertiveness as a songwriter and increasing inability to get along with Paul. George was the colorless Beatle, the dubious target of allegations of plagiarism, the man whose wife so cruelly inspired his lovestruck best friend Eric Clapton to write “Layla.” (And when the couple divorced and Clapton married Patti Harrison, who could not help but feel that the better man had finally won?)

George was not the best Beatle, God knows (nor the worst—sorry, Ringo). His oeuvre pales next to that of John and Paul, but George’s tunes are somehow unspeakably beautiful—simple, evocative, wise, true. (Let us overlook “I Got My Mind Set on You” for a moment.)