I use Excel as an analogy when explaining pointers. If you imagine the machine's memory as a gigantic, single column excel table, then a pointer -- or address -- to the third slot in the machine's memory would be the value 'A3'.
When you're referencing that row in Excel, you don't copy around its value, but rather, you copy the address of the value. That way, if you change the value, any other cells that reference it will also fetch the new value.
An even simpler analogy is a street address. (Or if you want to involve numbers: Postal codes.) An address is a place where people live, but it's not the actual place.
For people familiar with a spreadsheet, I think the Excel analogy better helps people understand the purpose of pointer dereferencing, because it's something you do all the time when building a mildly complex spreadsheet.
That's funny, my CS prof used to use addresses as an example of multi-dimensional array indices: "state" being a major index, down through city, street, to the number on the street being a minor index.
I like the analogy of PO boxes at the post office. They are contiguous, numbered, contain data (or not), and could have a forwarding address to a new PO box.
When you're referencing that row in Excel, you don't copy around its value, but rather, you copy the address of the value. That way, if you change the value, any other cells that reference it will also fetch the new value.